I'm Tawhida Kabir, an international student from Bangladesh but born and brought up in Dubai, a junior majoring in Electrical Engineering and your Design Project Co-Chair for the year 2021-2022!

I've always known some engineering departments had an overwhelming high ratio of men:women, but that fact was cemented when I realized I could count the number of women in my introductory ECE courses on one hand. Halfway through my second semester at UNM, I joined my first SWE meeting. It was a little daunting as most of the people there already knew each other, but they welcomed me in and I couldn't have been more excited! But, spoiler alert, the pandemic hit. That's why I couldn't be more excited to return to in-person classes and (hopefully) in person SWE meetings and make up for all the lost time by socializing, networking and attending conferences with my fellow SWEsters (that's such a cute nickname!). I'm currently located in Bangladesh, my home country, for the past half year and will be spending my summer here! I've been missing Dubai a lot and I haven't been able to visit because of the pandemic, but at least Bangladesh and Dubai have the heat and humidity in common! The rainy season here is the only highlight of my summer. I think it'll be great time to relax and watch a few shows and movies (Move to Heaven on Netflix is a really good, really sad show that you need to watch if you want a good cry!!) and pursue my hobbies of video editing (vidding) the things I watch, reading plane crash analyses and obscure wikipedia articles and taking pics of pretty sunsets and skies. Here are three sunsets from Sirajganj, Albuquerque and Dubai, respectively.