Outreach

Leadership & Mentoring Endeavours

Mentoring three undergrads on a Mental Health project at Manipal Institute of Technology (2022).
Mentor (career development) at India Forward, a non-profit making education more accessible in India (2021).
Core Committee Member and Reviewer for the Data Science Track, GHC’20.
Alumni POC and coordinator, International Research Mentorship Forum, Manipal (2019).
Founder of The One in Asankhya Project (2018).
Founder and Chairperson of ACM Women, Manipal (2018).
Manager of Google Developers Group, Manipal (2016-17).
Women Techmakers Community Lead, Manipal (2016-17).
Vice-Chairperson of IECSE, the official computer science club at Manipal University (2016-17).
Mentor at Learn IT Girl (2017).
Event head for Online Coding in Tech Tatva, the official technical fest of our college (2016).
Campus Ambassador for GeeksforGeeks (2016).
Mentor at Manipal University Summer of Code (2016).

Volunteering

Advisor at ‘Prayogshaala’s Rise Up’, where I hosted sessions for 60 women on tech job interviews.
Volunteer for the Open Data Science Conference Europe 2020.
Mentor at the WIT Rethink Program. I mentored women in building chatbots and enhancing their technical portfolios.
Teaching Volunteer at the Divine Mercy School. I taught Sri Lankan refugees Computer Applications.

Talks

Features

She Bleeds Bot

In 2018, Google Developers Group and Women Techmakers launched an Actions on Google campaign across India. The campaign was themed 'Solve for India'. As a part of this, I was intent on creating a chatbot that could raise menstrual health awareness among individuals.

#SheBleeds is advocating for a bill to be passed in the Indian legislature to grant menstrual leaves for women. They aim to start a dialogue on menstrual issues and address the period taboo in India. Their efforts include distributing sanitary pads in rural areas of India and educating girls about menstrual hygiene. After a series of discussions with the founder, Yash Mehrotra, I collaborated with the non-profit to design the She Bleeds chatbot.

The bot answers basic queries about their vision, petition, team, volunteering options and blog. It also answers queries on menstrual issues like PCOS, PMDD, PID etc. I've used rich responses like basic cards, over 230 relevant training phrases, media responses and contexts in this version. Try out the chatbot here. For details about the intent and privacy policy, visit the She Bleeds Virtual Assistant website and watch the demo video.

Apprécie-la

In 2015, Women Who Code and Pluralsight published a study on the need for more female role models, especially in STEM careers. During this time, I served as a lead at Women Techmakers (WTM) Manipal. A similar trend among the female students at my college startled me - we had no platform to applaud women role models at college. There were female tech enthusiasts at college who worked on impactful projects, bagged excellent internships, and won several technical events and scholarships. Ironically, we did not know or talk about each other.

How could we instil a higher sense of awareness? Through visibility. We thought of solutions analogous to WWC's #ApplaudHer initiative. As the first step, we built a website to highlight the achievements of women engineers at college.

We underscored the achievements of our seniors, peers and juniors. This encouraged our freshers to explore different opportunities like the GHCI scholarship, Google WTM Scholarship, and the MITACS program. Furthermore, the benchmark set by our seniors helped in self-assessment. Social media and contact links were shared to enable networking among alumni and current students. Lastly, we added a personal touch to the descriptions so that we could highlight interpersonal skills and raw smarts too. Male allies contributed to our repository, and the project is open source for our juniors to contribute. Our technical director of academics shared our website on Facebook. :) Our web dev team consists of Varuni, Harshini, Mayank and I.

ACM Women Manipal Website

Your work will never speak for itself. As a newly formed chapter, we wanted to reach out to more female technologists and male allies. This would enrich our idea pool, increase event participation and help us improve the quality of our events. Within a span of 8 months and with a team of 13 members, we conducted more than 5 unique signature events. This motivated us to collaborate with individuals from other diversity groups, technical clubs and colleges. In order to introduce them to our chapter, I created a fully responsive website. It elaborates on our mission statement, areas of focus, events, team details and latest blog articles.