Career Day at UMass Amherst Encourages Young Women to Become Engineers

 

 

DATE:           Monday, Oct. 29, 2012

TIME:            8:30 a.m. 

PLACE:        Campus Center Auditorium

 

More than 300 female high school students, teachers, and guidance counselors from across Massachusetts will travel to UMass Amherst to attend the annual Women in Engineering and Computing Career Day Conference.

 

At 10 a.m., participants will take part in one of four exercises designed to teach some of the fundamentals of engineering. Professors David Reckhow and Caitlyn Butler of the civil and environmental engineering department will lead activities exploring water quality. Graduate students from the polymer science and engineering department will teach the participants how to design and test a solar cell. Representatives from Raytheon will help small groups design a roller coaster. Another group of girls will explore computing through “artbotics” with a collaborator from UMass Lowell.

 

At several points throughout the day, the girls will have a chance to interact with collaborators from industry and see state-of-the-art technology demonstrations, which will include a Standoff Radiation Detection System mounted on a truck and an infrared camera.

 

The keynote address is at 11:15 a.m. by Valerie Gordeski of Raytheon, who will talk about “Engineering in the 21^st Century: Improving the World.”

 

At 9:15 a.m., a round table of engineering and computer science alumnae and current undergraduates will have a moderated discussion about careers in engineering, why they chose engineering, work-life balance, and any related questions that arise.

 

Districts and schools represented at Career Day are Amherst Regional High School, Frontier Regional High School, Greenfield Public Schools, Springfield Public Schools, Holyoke Public Schools, Mahar Regional High School, Oakmont Regional High School, Oxford High School, Southwick Tolland Regional High School, Groton Dunstable Regional High School, Chicopee Comprehensive High School, Townsend High School, North Middlesex High School, Hudson High School, AMS Charter School and Pathfinder Regional Vocational Technical School.

 

Contact: Phaedra Davis, 413/545-2030, pdavis@ecs.umass.edu