Women in Academia: Dos and Don’ts while Preparing for Higher Studies in Abroad.

IEEE NSU Student Branch, a part of the biggest community of Engineers IEEE, has been celebrating the IEEEDay’20 with several activities to connect globally with students & professionals in the field of Engineering. Like every year, IEEE NSU Student Branch organized a much more diversified and insightful series of events focusing on students development this year also. Among those events, “Talk session on Women in Academia”, was one stunning Talk session.

On 25th October 2020, IEEE NSU Student Branch organized a talk session named, “Women in Academia: Dos and Don’ts while Preparing for Higher Studies in Abroad”, in collaboration with INSB WIE Affinity Group. The honorable Speaker for this Talk session was Radiah Rivu; PhD Student at Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany. She completed her BSc. (CSE) at North South University and MSc at Technical University Munich in the year 2015 and 2018 respectively. She is currently working as a scientific researcher in the Usable Security and Privacy team at the Research Institute Cyber Defense and Smart Data (CODE) (Bundeswehr University Munich). Her research interest is about how Virtual Reality can be utilized as a novel research model to outstretch real-world lab and field studies.

Our honorable speaker started the Talk session sharing her journey from her undergraduate studies at North South University to CODE as a scientific researcher along with her early preparations to come up to this level and get the opportunity to hold a PhD at Bundeswehr University Munich was nurtured thoroughly. She talked about the obstacles she faced in her endeavor, the procedures and tactics she followed, the things she did but others shouldn’t and the consequences of certain incidents. How tough it was for her to get out of her comfort zone and find the impossible being a woman. She encouraged our participants, mainly women regarding the pursuit of Higher studies and explained how important it is to create a social & academical identity for oneself which she did through her studies. She emphasized more on the planning of Pursuing higher studies as most students tend to get stuck in the midway of application due to insufficient knowledge and proper planning. She talked about things needed to be done when one is studying Bachelors for a better chance in Higher studies and how to proceed later on, after completing Bachelors. She also explained how MSc and PhD are evaluated in different continents.

The Talk session was a really interactive one yet there was a Question Answer session where so much was discussed about. The Speaker was also well-prepared to answer those questions. At the very end of the event, everyone took a picture together on google meet and the speaker was honored with an E-certificate as a token of appreciation.

The session ended at around 9pm.