Engineering Club

This year has been .... exhausting. That word sums it up. I'm teaching one less class this year because we have a new schedule for freshmen, but it feels like I'm actually busier than my first year. At the end of last year I thought it would be a good idea to get involved in some extra activities since I had this idea that the second year would be easier than the first year. Well, I jumped into a few too many new projects and had to decide which ones were the highest on my priority list, even all of them were interesting and useful to me. One of those projects that I decided to keep pursuing was a new club I started called WISE (Women in Science and Engineering).

At the end of last year our school had received some funds from a similar group at the university in the hopes we would start a club that would encourage female students to pursue careers in the science and engineering fields. And at the beginning of this year, I applied for a grant and got it (yeah) that added to our funds. So I started with a fairly good sum of money, but no official students in the club.

A couple of months ago I announced the first official club meeting. I put posters around school, shared it on the morning announcements, and touted it up in the science classes. After all of this, I had one girl show up. Yeah for her! I have to say I was fairly bummed and less than hopeful that this club was going to hit it off. I shared all of my hopes and ideas with girl #1, and she was very excited about it. She said she would share it with her friends and try to get more people to come to the next meeting.

Meeting #2: Attendance = 2 girls. I doubled the club size, but was still a bit sad that I hadn't persuaded more ladies to attend my club meetings (I even brought milk and cookies!!). We brainstormed some ideas, and these awesome girls came up with some great ideas for events we could host at the school. The first official event was going to be inviting some university science and engineering students to come be on a panel to answer questions high school students may have about majoring in those areas. The next meeting was to be a planning meeting for this event.

Meeting #3: Attendance = 5 girls! Hip hip horray! This meeting we had five NEW girls come. The original two girls couldn't come at the last minute, but I was able to recruit some more members along the way. Again I shared my hopes and ideas with them, and they were very excited and super helpful with planning our 'first official event'.

'First official event': Attendance = 20 people! This was epic!! We has four university students from the civil engineering club and another civil engineering student from the engineers without borders group from campus. Plus an additional 15 or so high school students come to hear from our guests. The agenda was fairly loose, and I gave a short introduction to our guests and a promotion of our club, and then for the next hour and a half, the high school students asked question after question to these university students. It was incredible!!! And to top it off, at the end, the university students said they wanted to be more involved with engineering projects done with high school students. Oh my gosh!! They told the students that if they thought of a project, that they would support them as best as they could. This is HUGE for a teacher since we are sometimes limited with the knowledge, time, and resources to do these types of projects. So, to say the least, I was beside myself when I heard this.

And if you thought this was good... the next day, one of those students that was at the meeting came up to me and presented an engineering project that he wanted to do this year. Super cool!

I am very excited about this new club because I really think it creates a pathway for students to see what engineering and science careers are all about. Our guests shared so many cool experiences and possibilities to those students (some of them were freshmen), and who knows how that one experience may effect their lives. We are also planning on inviting professional engineers and scientists to talk to students, visiting labs and companies, doing research at nearby facilities, and even sharing science and engineering in a fun way with middle school students.

So while this year has been exhausting, it has also been very rewarding. I am very excited about the direction of our science department and WISE club because they are both giving our students amazing opportunities. Woo - hoo!!