With a track record of more than 90% of its graduates landing jobs within months of graduation, the California State University Maritime Academy is a unique, specialized CSU campus producing the maritime leaders of the future.
Located in Vallejo, California, on the scenic San Pablo Bay, Cal Maritime is one of only seven degree-granting maritime academies in the United States—and the only one on the West Coast. More than 800 students are enrolled in the Cal Maritime Corps of Cadets, pursuing degree programs in marine transportation, marine engineering technology, international business and logistics, mechanical engineering, oceanography, global studies and maritime affairs, and facilities engineering technology. These degrees open doors for graduates to pursue lucrative positions within the industry while positioning them for leadership roles in their field.
Since joining the California State University in 1996, Cal Maritime has highest employment rate in the CSU system. On average, Cal Maritime’s graduates receive several offers with starting salaries well above the national average.
One of the university’s more visible alums, Kate McCue (’00), became the first-ever American woman to captain a mega cruise ship when she took the helm of the Celebrity Summit in 2015 and now commands the Celebrity Edge—one of the cruise liner’s newest ships. In fact, with McCue at the helm, the Edge recently made headlines as the first cruise ship sailing with guests from a U.S. port after the pandemic shutdown of 2020.
McCue visited the Cal Maritime campus in May 2019 with Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, president & CEO of Celebrity Cruises, who gave a commencement address emphasizing the importance of growing diversity in the maritime industry—giving a shout-out to McCue in her speech. And during the university’s 2021 commencement, both student speakers were women: Marina Bartels, a Marine Transportation major, and Nicole Light Densberger, who earned an MSTEM (Masters in Transportation and Engineering Management).
Similar to the maritime industry, maritime academies have historically been challenged in achieving ethnic and gender diversity within their student bodies and faculties. As a public university in California, Cal Maritime is working to double minority representation on campus through active alumni recruiting efforts to identify candidates for enrollment and programs that support and celebrate diverse populations.
In addition, Cal Maritime hosts an annual Women in Maritime Leadership Conference offering opportunities for leadership development and networking for women in maritime and related fields. Captain McCue was keynote speaker for the March 2021 event, held virtually.
Women Lead in Cybersecurity | Cal State San Bernardino
With nine tenths of the world’s money transacted electronically, the need to protect and secure cyberspace only grows more urgent. As a Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity, Cal State San Bernardino’s Cybersecurity Center leads the nation’s community of 335 universities as part of that effort. Combined with its wide range of cyber-related degree programs, CSUSB prepares nearly double the national average for participation of women in the field, says Tony Coulson, Ph.D., executive director of the CSUSB Cybersecurity Center (CSC) and professor of information and decision sciences.
CSUSB is helping to prepare more women by offering several degree programs that include cybersecurity in a variety of fields—including four different bachelor’s degrees and five master’s options. Programs include information systems and technology with a cybersecurity concentration, public administration with cyber, business administration with cyber and crime analysis with cyber.
One program that is extraordinarily popular among CSUSB’s female students, Coulson says, is the national cybersecurity studies graduate program, which focuses on the global intelligence environment and intelligence analytics. “A lot of people think cyber is one dimension, super technical. But there’s a lot of intelligence work. There’s a lot of policy work,” Coulson explains.
The key to getting more women in cybersecurity and STEM, Coulson says, is creating a pipeline at the community level, to make it more natural for girls to think of these careers as options. CSUSB has partnered with the Girl Scouts to create what has become a trajectory-changing cyber camp for at-risk girls in the Inland Empire. Since 2015, over 1,400 Girl Scouts have participated in GenCyber and over 300 CSUSB students have contributed over 4,600 volunteer hours to help make the program success. Coulson explains that their CSUSB-based program eventually led to the Girl Scouts taking part in a national cyber initiative, including cyber badges.
“If you give students the opportunity and the resources, they’ll provide the passion and they will make this happen,” Coulson says. “That’s really been a hallmark of our philosophy and how we do things in the Cybersecurity Center.”
While female representation is growing in the cybersecurity workforce, it still has a ways to go. A 2013 study estimated that women represented just 11 percent of the cyber workforce. However, a 2019 report from the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC)² found that women comprised 24% of the global cybersecurity workforce. Yet, a 2020 report found that women make up just 21% of the North American cyber workforce.
CSUSB’s Cybersecurity Center continues to push the boundaries and possibilities of cyber education, especially for women.
Career-Ready Engineers | Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Since the 1980s, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Women in Engineering Program (WEP) has been recruiting and retaining women engineering and computer science students by focusing on outreach, on-campus support and workforce preparation.
While women continue to be underrepresented in the engineering workforce—only 13 percent are women—Cal Poly is taking steps to attract more women to the various engineering disciplines.
WEP Director Helene Finger explains that Cal Poly’s College of Engineering has a goal to have its demographic mirror the state of California, which is 50% women. “We’re up to 28% women in our incoming freshmen classes for the past few years. And as time goes on, our women students at Cal Poly and the College of Engineering are very academically successful,” says Finger. “We’re trying to get up to that 50% mark and really being thoughtful about making sure we’re reaching out to women of color in particular.”
Some of Cal Poly’s 13 engineering degree programs, such as biomedical engineering and environmental engineering, have more than half women enrolled, while women are less represented in other majors, including mechanical and electrical engineering, Finger says.
Working closely with the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Finger explains that Cal Poly’s WEP wants to send the message that there are many opportunities for women to earn bachelor’s degrees that will bring in a wage that can support their family.
One of the ways in which they attract more women to the field is through outreach via K-12 and community college partners to let women and girls know that there are many options in engineering. “You don’t have to absolutely and only love math to be a good engineer because it’s problem solving,” Finger says. While engineering majors will need to use math and science skills, many of Cal Poly’s students—especially women—have broad interests. “In order to solve our current problems and our future problems, we need a range of people who have a range of interests.”
Broad interests and problem-solving abilities have prepared Cal Poly’s women engineering grads to be job-ready on day one. “We have female alumni in every major who are doing amazing things,” Finger says. From NASA JPL to Disney to Google and Tesla, “they have been a really sought after group of students in industry.”
Beyond industry, some Cal Poly women engineering alumni are paying it forward in the academic field. One alumna is leading up diversity and inclusion efforts at Cal State Fullerton, and another is now an environmental engineering professor at Cal Poly Pomona.
