Treasurer
Pranati Dani
Why are you running for this executive position?
What’s your favorite SWE experience? Personally, mine was at my first SWE Community Outreach Bonding event last year. We spent the entire evening playing board games and talking about our college experiences, and instantly, the people who I had never known before became some of my best friends – I felt I had found a supporting community within SWE.
I am running for the positions of Treasurer and Vice President of Community Outreach because I want to pass on that same feeling to every woman that enters UW engineering. After speaking to several students, I often got feedback that SWE felt too large or intimidating for them, and as an executive officer next year, I want to remove this stigma.
In specific, to build up a larger feeling of community, as treasurer, I’d focus on allocating funds more strategically so we can spend more on morale items such as food during meetings and team-bonding activites like low-cost retreats. In addition, I’d also like to make the budgeting process easier and more understandable by everyone in SWE leadership. Often, many officers felt that the system was too difficult to navigate, and I want to ease that tension through creating short document guides with clear deadlines, and quarterly check-ins with each branch to answer any lingering questions.
If elected as VP of CO again, I would want to intergrate this branch more into our SWE general member community. This could be through more activites like the December GM’s card-making activity, such as building engineering-themed gift bags for our middle school students. In addition, speaking from my experience as VP this year, I would also like to consolidate the branch so that we prioritize effort on programs that have been more succesful and can be then expanded to more schools.
I’m excited to have the chance to continue to work with everyone next year!
What is your past involvement with SWE at UW?
My love for teaching and education is what led me to join SWE, and SWE was absolutely the perfect way for me to continue this passion. Freshmen year, I served as a part of SWE Explore and I loved getting to plan different activities and most importantly, getting to meet and connect with girls at schools such as Showalter middle school. The experience was irreplaceable. One of my favorite memories is after a lesson we taught on chromatography, the students asked us so many questions regarding UW and the programs here, and we genuinely felt the impact that SWE had on them.
My expereince with SWE Explore led me to run to be the Vice President of Community Outreach this year. This experience has been irreplaceable – working with the executive team has been an enriching experience and I’ve enjoyed being able to work with my officer team as well. As VP, I run, along with the team, 4 programs: middle school outreach, high school outreach, 2-year transfer outreach, and virtual contents. As VP, I’ve learned how to prioritize and strategically decide how programs will be structured, how to organize large events like the Engineering Exploration Conference, and most importantly, how to be a leader and manage 5 officers and over 30 committee members. I strongly believe that my expereince and work with SWE CO, has shown how I can prosper as a SWE executive member.
Lastly, I not only was extremely invovled with SWE Outreach this past year, but I’ve been a consistent member of our community. From participating in all of our SWE general meetings to building a community within our own CO branch through multiple bonding events with the officer and committee teams, SWE has helped me join an amazing group of people who support me both socially and academically. Thank you all for a great community and I am excited for what is in store for SWE next year!