WIM session during IWS2018

As part of the 2018 China Microwave Week (CMW2018), the 2018 International Wireless Symposium (IWS2018) was held in Chengdu, China on May 7 -9, 2018. The CMW2018 has drawn around 1500 attendees. Along with the conference, one special session on Women in Microwaves and Wireless organized by WIM subcommittee was also successfully held in the morning of May 9.

Over 30 people came and attended this event, including four panelists from Hong Kong and Mainland of China, Prof. Ke Wu and Prof. Maurizio Bozzi from MTT-S AdCom, a good number of female young professionals and graduate students. The wife of the German Consul in Chengdu also showed up for this special session.

The session consists of three parts: one invited talk and one warm-up speech, and then one panel discussion. The focus of this session is to inspire and motivate our female professionals to continue their careers and to cultivate an environment for professional growth of female engineers and researchers in both academic and corporate sectors. Furthermore, it also provides a platform for discussing challenges for male and female professionals during our multi-dimensional, multi-scale and multi-function life.

To begin with, Dr. Wenquan Che, the WIM subcommittee chair and the organizer of this event delivered a welcome greeting to the attendees, and also gave her thanks to Dr. Ye Han for all her efforts in preparation of this session. Dr. Lin Dai from the City University of Hong Kong was invited to give an interesting talk entitled “Massive Random Access: Fundamental Limits, Optimal Design, and Applications to M2M Communications”, which aims at providing satisfactory communication access efficiency of new-generation wireless communication. Then, Dr. Wenquan Che gave a short talk entitled “Observations behind the Gender Gap”, in which she shared some interesting and enlightening viewpoints about the gender gap. In this talk, it has been shown that although there are indeed intrinsic differences between the two genders, none of them is better or worse and both are equally important to the society. During the panel session, three panelists, Dr. Lin Dai, Dr. Xiuping Li and Dr. Ying Liu shared their opinions and experiences about the growth and balance between career and life. Prof. Ke Wu and Prof. Maurizio Bozzi also shared some of their thoughts and encouraged young female professionals to focus more on their own interests to explore their potential talents instead of the gender difference.

The session sparked a lot of debates and exchanges. The attendees enjoyed the sharing of the panelists. For either men or women, we should choose what we want and be whom we want to be. Most importantly, we need to focus on wise choices and then work hard for our own interests and dreams. On the other hand, the essence of our life is happiness physically and mentally, besides our professional career.