OHS Students Attend “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day”

March 04, 2011

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On February 18, 2011, OHS students Mallory Kleoppel, Corey Allen, Tabitha Clark and Kira Specker attended the first annual “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day” sponsored by the Society of Women Engineers and held on the UMKC campus.  The event gave the girls the opportunity to meet in small groups and talk with female engineers from all areas of engineering, to visit with representatives of local companies that hire engineers and 4-year colleges with engineering programs, and to ask questions of a panel of current female engineering students.  A keynote address was given by a local civil engineer who described her work in impoverished communities in the Dominican Republic as part of the group “Engineers Without Borders”.

The event sponsors wanted to expose young women to a vision of engineering that is very different from the stereotype of males working alone in an office doing math and science problems.  Girls attending the conference explored the creative side of engineering in an experiment extracting DNA from a banana, and in designing and building a small support structure from everyday objects.  They were accompanied by OHS teacher Julie Kramschuster.