Cazenovia — Eighth and ninth grade students at Cazenovia High School got a taste of what it’s like to be an engineer last week, when professionals from GHD engineers came into high school classrooms during National Engineering Week. The visit was not just to get more students interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, but to particularly get more female students interested.

“Last year, our technology program took a look at the number of girls enrolled in our Project Lead The Way (PLTW) courses at the high school and discovered that we had an alarmingly low number of females enrolled in our classes. Because technology courses are all electives, students choose to take our courses, and clearly the recent trend was that girls were just not choosing to enroll in those courses,” said CHS technology teacher Jason Hyatt, in whose class the GHD professionals talked to students last week. “The importance of having females in these fields is simple: if engineering is all about making our world a better place to live by creating solutions to people’s needs and wants, then we need as many perspectives as we can working toward that end to come up with better solutions.”

One approach to increasing STEM participation and interest in students was to have expert visitors, and, particularly for female students, provide girls with female role models to look up to and see how successful they have been in this field, Hyatt said.

“Whenever we can bring in a real engineer or STEM professional into the classroom it gives kids that real-life perspective. Students get to see what they learn in the classroom is actually being used in the real world,” Hyatt said. “It also gives kids a chance to hear those personal stories about how someone ended up in that profession and the education and experiences that they had to get them to where they are today. That’s a very powerful message, especially for girls, because they get to imagine themselves in that role.”

continued — Kathy Hahn, a senior EHS (environment, health and safety) compliance specialist at GHD who is also on the Cazenovia Board of Education, offered to help and last week brought a number of her female colleagues into six of Hyatt’s eighth and ninth grade classes to discuss their professions. Hahn, Beth Ann Smith, a senior geotech engineer, and Erica Goldin, an engineer only one year out of college, told Hyatt’s students how they got into their respective STEM fields, what they do at their jobs and what they enjoy about it.

Hahn said people who work in STEM fields are curious, creative, like to solve problems and can work as part of a team. “It’s not a boring field,” Hahn said. “You get to come up with ideas, design them and then make them work.”

Smith, a civil/environmental engineer, told the students about some of her projects, such as increasing capacity on a dam, running a pipe through a swamp and doing site remediation from contamination. She said she got into engineering because she “wanted to build things,” and she loves not only the creative aspect of it, but she loves feeling “proud and excited” when she sees a completed project.

Goldin, who graduated last year from University of Buffalo, told the students she always loved math and science in high school, but it was a class in environmental science she took during her senior year that put her on the path to becoming an engineer.

In talking about the importance of STEM careers, Hahn told the students how the majority of the items used today incorporate some aspect of STEM concepts. She used the example of a water bottle in the class to represent something seemingly simple — a container to hold a liquid — that was created using all aspects of STEM: materials science, ergonomics, technology using computer-aided design, engineering to design the machines to make the bottles and math as the foundation for all of those. “Almost everything we touch has its foundation in STEM,” she said.

continued — The engineers also gave students a hands-on challenge during their presentation: to design and build a load-bearing structure using 20 marshmellows, 30 toothpicks and 10 minutes, and see how much weight it would hold. Hahn, Smith and Goldin said they were impressed by the students’ knowledge and creativity, and also excited to see the group work together and share ideas.

By the end of each class, many students were surprised by the diversity of work that people in STEM careers and approached Hahn and her colleagues afterwards to ask what they might want to consider when thinking about college, Hahn said. One girl spoke with Smith and indicated she had never considered a STEM career but had a new appreciation after the presentation and may actually consider it, Hahn said.

“I thought the presentation by GHD was invaluable. They were able to share and speak from a perspective that I can’t provide to my students except through experiences like this,” Hyatt said. “They shared their passion for the work they do, they told us about projects they’ve done that have helped make our world safer, and they gave us a chance to try out our creativity and critical thinking to solve a problem. I’ve heard great feedback from students and I’m very appreciative of the time they gave to come in and speak to us.”