Progress Establishes Scholarship for Women in STEM

BEDFORD, Mass., Feb. 18, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and digital experience technologies, today announced that it has established the Progress Software Mary Székely Scholarship for Women in STEM. The scholarship was created to honor the late Mary Székely (pronounced: “See-kay”), Progress’ fourth founder, first employee and lead software engineer for more than 30 years. This scholarship is a key part of Progress’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative.  

This scholarship is a four-year renewable scholarship of $10,000 annually to cover tuition, fees and educational expenses. Eligible candidates are women, or those who identify as women, who reside in Massachusetts and who are pursuing an undergraduate degree in computer information systems, software engineering, IT and/or computer science. The application process for the 2020-2021 academic year is now underway and is administered by The Philanthropic Initiative, an affiliate of The Boston Foundation.

“Mary was the heart and soul of Progress’ engineering organization and a key architect of our flagship OpenEdge product,” said Yogesh Gupta, CEO Progress. “The tremendous impact she made on our company, our people and our customers is felt to this day. She was dedicated and generous, with a passion for learning who strove for excellence. What better way to honor her memory than to establish this scholarship; providing an opportunity for women to advance their education in STEM, in order to pursue a career in these fields.”

Mary Székely led development efforts at Progress for its core technology platform, Progress® OpenEdge®, for more than 30 years, from 1982 to 2013. She was a trailblazer at a time when women pursuing careers in STEM fields were rare. In addition to developing the product that would continue to drive Progress’ success, to this day, Mary had a love for math and science and was dedicated to expanding opportunities for anyone interested in the computer science field through mentorship and education.

“My mother began working as a software engineer in the 1970s, when there were very few women in the field. She felt that the best way to get ahead as a woman was through hard work, thorough study and dedication,” said Mary’s daughter, Cathryn Székely. “She proved that if you focused on becoming irrefutably good at what you do, and on making your customer successful, everything else would fall into place. She would have been grateful to know that Progress, the company she loved and dedicated her career to, is honoring her and helping advance women’s careers in this way.”

Scholarship recipients will be chosen based on academic achievement; interest and experience in computer information systems, software engineering, IT and/or computer science; and personal attributes that exemplify Mary Székely’s qualities. Completed applications are due Friday, March 20, 2020 by noon EDT. The selected recipient will be notified in the spring and a public announcement will follow in June during ProgressNEXT 2020.

For more information, please go to www.progress.com/social-responsibility. To submit an application, click here.

About Progress
Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. We enable customers and partners to deliver modern, high-impact digital experiences with a fraction of the effort, time and cost. Progress offers powerful tools for easily building adaptive user experiences across any type of device or touchpoint, the flexibility of a cloud-native app dev platform to deliver modern apps, leading data connectivity technology, web content management, business rules, secure file transfer, network monitoring, plus award-winning machine learning that enables cognitive capabilities to be a part of any application. Over 1,700 independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers, and two million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn about Progress at www.progress.com or +1-800-477-6473.

Progress is a trademark or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the US and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

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