a safe space for women to collaborate and share their ideas comfortably. History Though the Society of Women Engineers did not become a formal organization until 1950, its origins date to the late 1940s, when shortages of men due to World War II provided new opportunities for women to pursue employment in engineering. Female student groups at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia and at Cooper Union and City College of New York in New York City began forming local meetings and networking activities. On April 3, 1949, seventy students attended a conference at Drexel to start organizing. These seventy students traveled from 19 universities. National vice president Maryly Van Leer Peck and her mother Ella Lillian Wall Van Leer a women's right activist became heavily involved early on, they opened one of the first branches at Georgia Tech after her father Blake R Van Leer successfully lobbied to allow women to attend. Blake also encouraged numerous women to join his engineering program while at NC State. The Van Leers would actively support the organization throughout their lives. On the weekend of May 27–28, 1950, about fifty women representing the four original districts of the Society of Women Engineers – New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Boston – met for the first national meeting at The Cooper Union's Green Engineering Camp in northern New Jersey. During this first meeting, the society elected the first president of SWE, Beatrice Hicks. The first official annual meeting was held in 1951, in New York City. It was not until the 1960s, after Russia launched Sputnik and widespread interest in technological research and development intensified, that many engineering schools began admitting women. Membership in SWE doubled to 1,200 and SWE moved its headquarters to the United Engineering Center, in New York City. After World War II, women were often discouraged from entering into engineering. During the war, their efforts had been seen as a patriotic duty; after the war, women in engineering were seen as an abnormality. Over the next decade, an increasing number of young women chose engineering as a profession, but few were able to rise to management-level positions. SWE inaugurated a series of conferences (dubbed the Henniker Conferences after the meeting site in New Hampshire) on the status of women in engineering, and in 1973 signed an agreement with the National Society of Professional Engineers in hopes of recruiting a