Building Styrofoam airplanes and mixing detergents to see chemical reactions are among the many activities a local organization will bring to campus this weekend.
Hosted by Cal State Long Beach, Future Girls @ The Beach: STEM Residential Program will allow 24 middle school girls from the Long Beach Unified School District who are interested in science, technology, engineering or mathematics — an opportunity to explore and engage in these fields, according to a press release.
The program will last from Aug. 1 to Aug. 5.
“[We want] to inspire young girls that would like to consider engineering profession in the future,” said Saba Yohannes-Reda, the director for the K-12 Outreach & Recruitment Center for the CSULB Engineering Students Success Center.
The students will be able to stay overnight at the dorms on campus for days while taking field trips to science and engineering labs, the Columbia Memorial Space Center and workshops to better educate them about opportunities in these fields.
CSULB organizations such as Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers will offer some of their students to mentor the girls.
Yohannes-Reda, who helped organize the program, said she hopes that the girls’ visit to campus will give them some exposure to various engineering disciplines as well as having the opportunity to be mentored by other CSULB female engineering faculty and students.
The program will be at no cost to the students. $20,000 out of the $86,000 received from a Senate Bill 70 CTE grant, an initiative on improving and strengthening career technical education supported by Long Beach City College and LBUSD was used for the program.
According to a report shown on PBS.org, there are twice as many men than women who attend graduate school in computer science fields, with more than four times as many men enrolled in engineering.