The Great Hall in Levering was filled with laughter, smiles and chatter as 43 girls ran around with paper, cardboard, sticks and glue for their projects this past Saturday. The girls were exploring engineering at a program hosted by Hopkins's Ready Set Design!
Ready Set Design! is devoted to showing middle school girls what engineering is about and how it could be a fun potential career option.
"We found that even though more than 50 percent of college students are women … only one third are actually in engineering. So Ready Set Design! is trying to encourage more girls to go into engineering," junior Allison Tse, vice president of Ready Set Design! and a mechanical engineering major, said. "We think that they kind of get discouraged because it's a very technical field, and there aren't a lot of women in engineering right now. They don't see a lot of role models, so they don't really think of introducing it to them."
Ready Set Design! hosts two events per semester that revolve around the same theme. The girls in attendance were split into several groups that design a project related to the theme and make prototype models.
This year's theme was "Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Oh My!" The projects the girls worked on tried to help disaster relief.
"We like to keep the theme consistent with things they might be talking about in school, what they might be talking about within their homes, " Rachel Sangree, faculty advisor of Ready Set Design! said. " And of course, tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes we've all been discussing with our children, so it seemed very relevant and possibly maybe... they've seen damage caused these natural disasters on television or in the news."
Sangree was a graduate student studying civil engineering when she started as a volunteer for Ready Set Design! six years ago, in 2005, when it was founded by Professor Lester Su, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
From building tsunami-sustainable hospitals to designing baby strollers than can move smoothly along uneven terrain, the girls were busy at work. The middle school students came up with their own ideas and executed them. By the end of the day, they had a finished product, a prototype of their designs.
"[I like] interacting with the girls because they actually have a lot of good ideas and I'm always impressed by what they are able to contribute. It's really nice to just kind of be able to mentor them," Tse said.
The program is welcome to all middle school girls in the area. Many come from the towns surrounding Baltimore and sometimes cross state borders from Virginia. The program proves to be successful with parents continuing to send their younger children, after their older siblings participated in past years. Members are both undergraduate and graduate engineering students, and female engineering students are paired up with each girl as a mentor for the day.
"We pair the girls up with female engineering students... so that they can not only get some guidance from them as they are going along in their design, they can also just see that women are choosing engineering as a career path," Sangree said.
Ready Set Design! provides an noncompetitive, interactive, hands-on experience specifically targeted to middle school girls. Members of Ready Set Design! believe that this is a crucial age so that these young girls can start planning for a career in engineering early on.
"[We do this] by introducing [engineering] to them early on, so that they can prepare, start taking math and science classes in high school, just to show them that engineering is fun," Tse said.
Middle school is a time when students look for guidance and may seriously consider engineering with a fresh mind.
"It's a profession that is often a little bit mysterious," Sangree said. "I think they don't know exactly what engineers do. Middle school is also a time when you're not thinking about what you are going to do for the rest of your life, but you are sort of deciding, in a way, whether you are going to like math and science or not. So introducing, through this experience, different types of engineering and how engineers design, how the design process works."
Tse noted that she discovered she liked engineering later in her academic career, and programs like this can help girls like her pursue their interests earlier.
"That's part of the reason I kind of want to do this type of program. I wasn't exposed to engineering when I was in high school," she said.
Sangree sees the usefulness of the program from a parent's perspective. She sees girls' lack of knowledge about engineering in her own daughter.
"I did not know what an engineer was, what an engineer did," Sangree said. "When I welcome the students, I tell the silly, very very one line story about my daughter, where she has two engineers as parents, but she thinks I go and drive a train everyday... so that's what kids think an engineer is."
