December Member of the Month: Ashton McCary

Congratulations to Ashton McCary, Dallas SWE’s December 2021 Member of the Month!

Ashton is a native to Dallas graduating from the University of Texas at Dallas with a BS degree in Chemistry. She worked at Raytheon Technologies for nine years as a materials process engineer and a failure analysis chemist. Her responsibilities included performing root cause investigations of material and chemical related product failures.

While at Raytheon, Ashton also served on the Raytheon Women’s Network leadership team starting in 2018. In these roles, she worked on a team with several amazing ladies to promote women in STEM by putting on lunch & learns, networking events, and organizing volunteer work for young girls interested in STEM. This is when Ashton first became introduced to the Society of Women Engineers. Raytheon collaborated with the Society of Women Engineers by providing volunteers for Design Your World which she attended.

Ashton recently left Raytheon in order to explore a career change to patent law. It is also around this time Ashton officially joined the Society of Women Engineers. She is currently engaged with the outreach committee to plan a collaborative event with The Girl Scouts for this year’s Design Your World.

Ashton quotes, “I am impressed by the encouragement, positivity, knowledge and passion among the members of Dallas SWE and feel honored to be a member! The Dallas SWE president heard my desire to pursue patent law and immediately connected me with another woman in the field. The VP of Outreach takes every opportunity she can to encourage and recognize other members. The members of Dallas SWE are consistently warm and welcoming!”

Introducing our new VP of Outreach, Rana Karimi

Dallas SWE would like to welcome our new VP of Outreach, Rana Karimi! Rana is a Senior Consultant at ProcureAbility where she advises her clients in strategic sourcing, procurement best practices, and category management in engineering and technical categories. As a mechanical engineer and STEM professional, Rana cares deeply about promoting women in STEM. She has previously served on our Executive Committee as VP of Membership for FY20-21, and Secretary in FY19. Her creativity and passion for STEM will help guide our outreach efforts for the remainder of FY22.

Kickoff Meeting Recap

Dallas SWE had its first kickoff event of FY22 in Cottonwood Park in Richardson on Saturday, October 9th. We got to mingle while playing fun board games and online games at this event, which was a perfect way to meet fellow SWEsters. The event was held both virtually and in-person with masks on. Fortunately, the weather that weekend was fantastic! The in-person party played Pandemic and many rounds of Secret Hitler, while the virtual group played GeoGuessr. GeoGuessr is a geographic discovery game in which the players have to guess their location based on Google Street view. Pandemic is a great cooperative game in which you must eliminate four diseases that are threatening to wipe out a region. Secret Hitler is a fun deduction game in which you have to figure out who the Hitler is in the group. We hope everyone who attended to the kickoff had a great time!

We will be reading “The Courage to Be Disliked” for the Dallas SWE Book Club

Come treat yo “shelf” with the Dallas SWE Book Club! Never read Fitzgerald? Brontë? You Gatsby kidding me! Come get a breath of fresh Eyre with us!

The Dallas SWE Book Club survey has been conducted to vote for the next book club read, and the people have spoken! We have selected The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi.

Please begin obtaining your copy and reading the book. We hope this will be a great read to fit in over the holidays! We will be convening sometime in January to discuss the book. The exact meeting details will be provided at a later time.

Joint DFW NSBE-SHPE-SWE Social

Save the Date! NSBE DFW, SHPE DFW, and Dallas SWE are planning a joint social for Thursday, December 9, starting at 6pm. We are working on the details so location is TBD. Keep an eye out for updates and we hope to see you there!

In-person Membership Appreciation Celebration

Join Dallas SWE for annual membership appreciation event! We will be going ice skating for two hours while we network and celebrate you! Keep a look out for more details, coming soon!


The in-person event will be December 4 from 12-2 PM. Location to be announced. Register for this event on Eventbrite or below!

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