Annual women-in-engineering event creates sparks in middle-school girls

By JEFF EPSTEIN
[email protected]
ACWORTH — Northern Heritage Mills, Inc., a local nonprofit organization, is celebrating and planning for the future after a day of workshops to help middle-school girls learn about careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). 

The Young Women In Engineering event, held Wednesday at the River Valley Technical Center (RVTC) in Springfield, Vt., placed 60 girls from middle schools in Vermont and New Hampshire into one of at least six technical workshops, each hosted by a company specializing in the workshop’s field, said Northern Heritage Mills leader Gerry DeMuro. Each workshop, led by a female engineer, was an immersive, specialized day of activities and training, with hands-on projects for the student teams.

According to RVTC, the workshop topics included electrical circuits, hosted by Eversource; plasma cutting, hosted by Hypertherm; marine engineering and navigation, hosted by the Landing School from Maine, building solar lanterns, hosted by the Thayer School of Engineering, constructing precision electrical products, hosted by Whelen Engineering; and solar electric technologies, hosted by Norwich Technologies. A seventh workshop may also have been included late, DeMuro said.

DeMuro cited the marine workshop as one example of how hard work can lead to student enthusiasm. Activities included construction of a 14 by 20-foot pool, used to float small sailboats. The sailboats demonstrated principles of fluid dynamics in a way that made it real for the girls. 

“They were just thrilled to see these little boats go flying across their pool,” he said.

Over in the solar energy workshop, five professionals mentored 10 girls, helping them build photovoltaic cells. Although the PV cells were actually powered by overhead fluorescent lights for the workshop, building them offered the opportunity to learn about the sun, and the enormous distance solar energy has to travel through space to get to Earth.

Still other students built bridges and other projects, and overall they all came away happy and stimulated by the day’s learnings. “We have to get these girls and keep them going,” he said. 

Calling the day “very successful,” DeMuro noted that it hasn’t always been easy. Northern Heritage Mills has put on the Young Women In Engineering event annually for the past eight years, but has encountered some “resistance” in the past, he said. “It’s been a struggle to put this on.” Setting up and running the all-day program requires some 20 volunteers working over 400 person-hours, he said. 

This year the event moved from Claremont to RVTC to take advantage of the space the technical center offered. RVTC, which has some 300 students of its own each day, was wildly enthusiastic about the chance to help out Northern Heritage Mills, DeMuro said.

With the success of the Young Women In Engineering event, Northern Heritage Mills is now looking to do a similar event next summer, at a site in Cornish.

But the organization is just one of several across the country that try to engender of a love of technical learning into girls who, according to social research, begin to feel pulled away from technical subject during their middle-school years. 

A year ago, the magazine “The Atlantic” sponsored a Boston forum titled “Cracking the Code: The Next Generation of Women in STEM” in which top female leaders of both profit and nonprofit organizations discussed the topic. In some schools, an arts aspect is included and the program called “STEAM”. 

For his part, DeMuro prefers the original STEM term, although he agrees many technical projects include an arts component.