We had an incredible conference yesterday, thanks to each and every one of our donors. With 70 participants, we had a full house with incredible energy and excitement. With the generous contributions of our sponsors, we were able to provide each participant with a bag, t-shirt, personalized schedule, as well as breakfast and lunch for the day! Since we exceeded our goal of $3,000, we also had some extra funds that we used for a raffle drawing at the end of the day. Five lucky participants walked away with one of our awesome prizes: a drone, bluetooth speakers, a Google Home, programmable robot Jimu, or an Amazon Fire tablet!

All of our speakers were incredible! Alex Hall from Zee.Aero in San Fransisco started the day off with a great keynote presentation. Two Garmin engineers then led a competitive activity where the participants worked in teams to build bionic arms! We kept the participants engaged during lunch with a robotics demonstration from Dr. Williams, the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. During the afternoon, we had three breakout sessions. There were tours of lab facilities, including the Spine Biomechanics Lab and Jayhawk Motorsports. Rachel Attebery from Black and Veatch gave a wonderful presentation on the myths of being an engineer. We also had panels where the girls were able to talk with current engineering students, and the moms heard from engineering faculty.

Make it Happen was a huge success, and we had a lot of great recognition from the community. Our event was featured on the front page of the Lawrence Journal World on Saturday morning! Also, we were recognized on KU's School of Engineering Facebook page with some great photos from the day. We could not be more grateful for the support from our sponsors, the community, and everyone else that helped us Make it Happen!

Be sure to check out Spark's Facebook page for more photos from the event! https://www.facebook.com/sparkatku/

You can check out our article in the Lawrence Journal World here: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/feb/17/ku-students-launch-make-it-happen-conference-encou/

- Ashley and Alita

With just four days left, we are so close to hitting our goal!! We just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has donated, and we really appreciate all of the support. 

In less than two weeks we'll be putting on the conference, and we can't wait to share all of the cool activities and guest speakers we have lined up. It's going to be a great event!

-Alita and Ashley

WOW! You guys are awesome. It's been just a week since the launch of our campaign and we are almost to our goal. Please continue sharing our conference with friends and family so we can hit our $3,000 mark!

We're in the home stretch of planning. Our conference is just over a month away! We've got exciting speakers lined up with cool activities that your generous contributions will allow us to do.

Thanks for helping us Make it Happen!