Cal State Long Beach was awarded one of nine grants worldwide for an engineering outreach program geared toward fifth-grade girls and their mothers.
The “My Daughter is an Engineer” programs was designed to promote technology outreach and engineering career awareness amongst Long Beach Unified School District fifth-grade girls.
Bei Lu and Panadda Marayong, assistant professors from the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Lily Gossage, director of the college of engineering recruitment and retention center, collaborated for the $16,000 grant from IEEE Control Systems Society and additional funding from the California Space Grant Consortium.
The three-day program will take place in July. Girls and their mothers will stay in CSULB dorms, go on a field trip and participate in activities, including hands-on robotics workshops, control technology and academic success.
Teachers from chosen schools will also participate in workshops and be trained in four NASA Directorates as part of the consortium grant.
All participants are chosen on a competitive basis, which requires students to demonstrate “academic success in standardized math and science scores,” Gossage said.
The LBUSD schools are selected based on low-income and high-minority student enrollment because “women and certain ethnic minorities are still underrepresented in the engineering and technology field,” Marayong said via email.
According to Gossage, less than 10 percent of professional engineers are women because the occupation is often associated with social stigma for women.
“As research has shown that girls lose interest in [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] by the time they reach eighth grade, we target elementary school students in an attempt to capture their interest in [these areas] as early as possible,” Marayong said.
Gossage said many students shy away from engineering as a career choice because of a “lack of awareness of the engineering discipline” and the failure to fully apply math and science within the profession.
While an appreciation of the sciences is important to engineering, so is strong parental involvement.
“The uniqueness of our program is to invite both girls and their moms because we believe that moms play an important role in guiding her daughter’s career path,” Lu said via email.
The department has hosted a number of other outreach events to raise awareness of womens’ opportunities in technological and engineering careers through “Engineering Girls @ the Beach” and “Women Engineers @ the Beach.”
Gossage said that any donations to the program can be made to the CSULB Foundation, addressed with “Women and Engineering Program” in the memo.
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