Hi, I’m Sai! I’m the new Communications Apprentice here at Mentoring Women’s Network. For the next eight weeks I’ll be working alongside Samantha to help MWN Foundation transition to Pass the Torch for Women Foundation on social media.

To tell you more about myself, I’m a recent graduate from the School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI here in Indianapolis. I majored in Media Arts & Science with a focus on game design and 3D modeling. Before that, I earned my associates degree in Digital Media at Parkland College in central Illinois. This past summer I interned with the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute as an artist and producer on a mobile game called Hibachi Hero, which is available for free on iOS and coming soon for Android. While I was working on Hibachi Hero I was responsible for a majority of the marketing for the game on social media. I also ran social media for several different student organizations at IUPUI during my time in school, including the Game Developers’ Group and Women in Technology.

One of the reasons I’m so excited to work with Mentoring Women’s Network is because there’s a huge need for mentorship in the game development industry, especially for women navigating the challenges involved with working in a male-dominated field. Last March I had the privilege of being selected for the first year of Intel’s Diversity Scholars program (now called the Women in Games Ambassadors) at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which is a branch of a larger scholars program run by the International Game Developers Association Foundation. While the experience was life changing, one of the biggest regrets for the organizers was that they weren’t able to match each scholar individually with a mentor on such short notice, and instead had a couple mentors meet with the entire group of 30+ scholars a couple times during the week-long conference. I want to use my experiences with this apprenticeship to not only become a mentor to others, but to reach out to the organizations and people who have had the biggest impact on my journey and encourage them to also become mentors.

So I’m almost done with my first week at MWN (which isn’t saying all that much since I’m only here four days a week), and I’m still learning the ropes. Everyone has been extremely welcoming. Not a lot of social media-ing has happened yet because I still need to meet with Samantha and Alison to go over the specifics of the rebranding and figuring out which accounts will stay under the MWN name and which will be converting to Pass the Torch for Women Foundation. It’s a bit of an intimidating task, but I’m also really excited to take on this challenge. Expect an update from me soon!