My Story
I have been interested in engineering since elementary school. My dad is an engineer, so he introduced me to the career path very early and inspired me to explore it. I have been involved in engineering competitions all throughout my scholastic career. Just recently I participated in the SourceAmerica Design Challenge, which is a national competition to use engineering to design an assistive device for someone with disabilities, which was an incredibly humbling experience.
Engineering is my definite career path, so I think I am a good fit to encourage girls to explore it because of that. I have been involved in the engineering program at the high school as well as attending field trips centered around engineering. In addition, I have worked with middle school girls in the past through my other activities so I am able to connect with them and get my message across. I would love to be able to share my passion for engineering with younger girls, as the gender imbalance in STEM is a serious problem and something very important to me. I hope to be able to impact these girls' lives and show them what engineering can offer them.
My Project
My project would be a full day in-school field trip located at the middle school in my district, which houses 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. The main goal of this full day program, which I would advertise as a “Girls in Engineering Day,” is to encourage middle school girls in my district to take more engineering classes and eventually go into engineering themselves by sparking interest early on.
The day would begin with a popular engineering design challenge, like the marshmallow spaghetti tower challenge, which would get the girls excited for the day and interested in the rest of the program. Following this, I would give an engaging presentation on as many different engineering disciplines as possible that would include information on the duties of each job, salary information, companies that specialize in the field, education necessary, career progression, and more. I would then like to give an overview of the classes offered at the high school and middle school that relate to engineering fields and demonstrate what you do in the class with possibly some student testimonials. After that, the girls would do a second engineering design challenge, like the egg drop challenge. Then we would have a short break for the girls to eat lunch and talk about some of the things we’ve covered so far in the day. After lunch, the program would end with a Q&A with a panel of female engineers at various points in their career fields who would discuss their day to day work and how they got to that point. I would especially search for alumni from my high school to discuss what classes they took in high school and the benefits of them. Hopefully these women would be able to provide some female role models to the middle school girls who participate in the program and also give a better idea of what working as an engineer is really like.