Welcome to WCS Outreach! We are the subdivision of WCS dedicated to encouraging young women to pursue a computer science education. Although 51% of the United States population is female, only 18% of Computer Science bachelor’s degrees are earned by women. Women’s voices are needed in tech, and we want to do our part in making those numbers change.

We have multiple initiatives: Chictech, High School Visits, our Explore CS Series, and CS+X Panel.

In the Fall 2020 semester, WCS Outreach presented an informative video series about the research the professors at UIUC professors have done using computer science applications, to impact different fields of work. We hope this will allow young teenagers, and possibly even you reading this, to learn more about the opportunities available through studying computer science!

We brought professors from all fields of expertise to talk about how they have used computer science to complete their research and how it affects the field they work in, as well as communities around the world!

Check out installments of the series on our YouTube channel , with more information on the Explore CS Tab of our website.

Also make sure to check out our introductory article to learn more about the goals behind this series!

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is known for having a variety of diverse CS related majors available for students to study. These majors fall under what is known as the CS+X Degree Program, which includes 11 majors in total (listed here). In addition to these fields of study are the Mathematics & CS and Statistics & CS majors as well!

This semester, WCS reached out to highschools across the country to involve students in our new CS+X Panel, which took place on Thursday, March 25th 2021! We discussed the CS+X Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and had real Illinois CS+X university students come to talk about their experience and answer questions! Advisors from the CS department at UIUC also participated in the panel to talk about resources within the department.

Check out the presentation to learn more about the CS+X program, and our compiled Q&A Document to get answers to the questions of your choice!

ChicTech is a full day event dedicated to introduce high schoolers to Computer Science by teaching them to make their own project to show off to friends and family. This year, we will be going through how to make your own website and data visualization using Github Pages, HTML/CSS, and d3.js! We will be having Professor Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, the creator of many visualizations used by news organizations and the government, and Ritika Adhikari (CS Illinois 2020) as a keynote speaker and teaching the data visualization portion.

We visit high schools to speak to students, especially those underrepresented in tech fields, about STEM and why computer science could be the right field for them.