More than 300 middle school and high school girls designed catapults, toured research laboratories and listened to student panels at the 40th annual Career Day for Girls held this Saturday in the Technological Institute.
“Girls aren’t exposed to engineering when they are younger,” said McCormick sophomore Emily Masters, an executive board member of the Northwestern chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, the group that organized the event. “It’s not a subject in school to take and these girls probably haven’t met any engineers yet. It’s very important that they learn what’s out there and see the possibility of dong this when they are older.”
Almost 50 volunteers from SWE helped run the event all-day event, which exposed girls in grades 6-12 and their parents to the field of engineering and encourages them to pursue engineering as a career. “Engineering a Better World” was this year’s theme.
“I chose this theme because I wanted to stress the social impact that engineers have,” McCormick junior and event coordinator Rachel Cassidy wrote in an e-mail.
“Girls often express that they want a job where they can help people or make a difference, but many do not see that they can make a difference using math and science,” Cassidy said.
After hearing from keynote speaker Betty Shanahan, the executive director of SWE, participants took part in a small design competition. Using ordinary household supplies, SWE challenged the girls to build a catapult that could launch an object at a target.
“It was fun seeing these girls get into it right away, working together and getting to know others in the group,” Masters said.
Students then visited research laboratories across North Campus where graduate engineering students explained what they were working on and showed off some of the tools and programs they work with.
Freshman biomedical engineering major Iboro Ikene said she was intrigued when she attended the event as a junior in high school.
“I always thought engineering was something super hard that only super geniuses do,” she said. “But during the design process it occurred that I was able to do these things and design something that worked in 23 minutes.”
Women comprise about 30 percent of the student body at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. This percentage is well above the national average of women studying engineering at college campuses in America.
Following lunch, the high school and middle school girls split up. Middle school girls rotated between hands-on activities, including designing a water filter with low-cost household materials. High school girls work in teams on the Apollo 13 design challenge, a project also assigned to some freshmen in McCormick. The high schoolers heard about specific majors in panels.
McCormick sophomore Meredith Schaefer attended Career Day for Girls as a sophomore and junior in high school. Schaefer said these panels helped her decide to study engineering at NU.
“I loved the support I found when I came in high school from women in the field,” he said. “I always feel, especially in high school, all the boys say to the girls, ‘Well, you can’t do math.’ That’s why a day set aside for girls’ math and science is so important.”
