Volunteering Experience of Kripa Kundaliya

Early on while pursuing my undergraduate degree, I used to attend most of the IEEE events being conducted in my college as a guest. Those events have always been inspiring in terms of what technical advancements have we witnessed and further bringing in a sense of continuous growth for humanity. Along with that, it offered an awesome set of connections with intellectuals from those events. Also, I loved the idea of IEEE WIE to promote women around the world to follow their academic interests in a career in engineering and science, as I have been observing lower interests of women in technological fields in my surroundings. These things all together prompted me to become an IEEE member to contribute to its mission of fostering technical innovation for the benefit of humanity, as well as help WIE to promote gender balancing in STEM.

I have been fortunate to be a part of the IEEE Women in Engineering Project Based Learning (PBL) Camp held from 3rd to 11th April 2021. The PBL Camp has been a collaborative initiative by WIE Madras Section, WIE Gujarat Section, WIE UP Section, Ramneek Kalra (IEEE Impact Creator) and WIE Bombay Section AGs. This camp is the motivational source of learning approach and enthusiasm to share among the young minds across the globe and make them Industry-Ready with basic concept awareness. To be a volunteer for IEEE WIE PBL Camp was a wonderful learning experience. I have been a part of the Content and Communication Team in the Camp Organizing Committee where we provided support for the development of content of publicity & outreach with communication among the stakeholders of the Event. I enjoyed being a moderator for the opening and closing ceremonies of the PBL Camp. I had also been allotted to mentor the students for their projects as one of the decided mentors could not show up at the last moment. I feel fortunate to be a part of the PBL Camp where I could contribute to foster the development of student’s interests in the STEM fields.

IEEE community has immense potential to provide to each of its members and I think that it has personally helped me to be a more confident individual while bringing in me a greater sense of giving back to society in different ways. It has provided me with various opportunities to outgrow my leadership skills as I have been the Secretary of IEEE MEFGI Student Branch and been the Chair and Vice-chair of IEEE WIE MEFGI branch at different points of time in my journey with IEEE.

My favorite IEEE story has to be the Women’s Week Celebration at Marwadi University that has been conducted in collaboration with IEEE WIE MEFGI Branch. Planning, organizing, managing and anchoring many different events throughout the week at large scale has been exciting. Virtual Networking Tour with Visionary WIE Leaders was one of the events under the same and is one the best experiences I had in volunteering for events.

I have been pretty active in other extracurricular activities at my college too. I love anchoring and thus I have been anchoring many different big stage events like MU Fest, TEDx Marwadi University etc. I was also awarded with the Dewang Metha IT Award in 2018 for securing the highest rank in academics in my college.

To sum up, I would like to thank everyone who has been part of my IEEE journey and has helped me grow into the person I am today. Special thanks to Prof. Foram Rajdev, Prof. Kirtiraj Sinh Zala and Mr. Ramneek Kalra for the wonderful guidance and great opportunities that they provided me in IEEE.