For five days, Cal State Long Beach dorms were home to 20 middle school girls with one common: an interest in science, technology, engineering or mathematics — the STEM “Future Girls @ The Beach: STEM Residential Program” was a program that aimed to provide young girls with an opportunity to explore various topics that fell within the context of the program, which originally expected 24 girls, according to its press release, featured a series of STEM workshops for the girls.
The topics ranged from roller coasters to slime monsters.
David Braunstein, Academic Coordinator for the K-12 Outreach and Recruitment Center, led the workshop on Styrofoam gliders on Friday, the first day of the program.
“I flunked retirement twice,” Braunstein joked as he explained his lengthy career in chemical engineering. Eventually, he taught at Jordan High School in Long Beach and brought the Math Engineering Science Achievement program to that campus.
He said that by having a career in engineering, he “got paid to play for 35 years,” and he hopes his students will take their turn “playing” in one of the STEM fields.
Also on the first day of the program, Vahe Kludjian, a lecturer in the engineering department at CSULB, ran the “Portland Cement Concrete Slump” workshop.
At the workshop, a group of girls was broken into four teams; in teams, the girls molded cylinders out of sand, rocks, cement and water. This workshop came full circle on the final day of the program when each team had the chance to measure the consistency of their cement by putting their hand-made cylinders to the “slump test.”
Each group tested their now hardened cylinders with compression. Emile Castillo, a student participant from Signal Hill, was in the fourth group.
“I think it looks pretty sturdy,” Castillo said of her group’s cylinder before Kludjian directed the compression. One by one, the cylinders cracked and crumbled, only to be cast aside.
Saba Yohannes-Reda, Director of the K-12 Outreach and Recruitment Center for the CSULB Engineering Student Success Center, said she hopes this program will help to bring more women into the various STEM professional fields.
“Hopefully they bonded, [or] they made some connections with civil engineering faculty,” Yohannes-Reda said of her hopes for the group of girls in this year’s program. “Most of these girls like math, so that’s what it takes most of the time; but, at the same time, they want to see a role model.”
Yohannes-Reda explained that the four resident assistants for the program were all female engineering students from CSULB, who could play the part of role model for the middle school students participating.
Andrea Calderon, a senior mechanical engineering major, served as an resident assistant for the program and said she hopes each of these girls will be on campus pursuing STEM majors one day.
“The program is for girls from age 12 to 14,” Calderon said. “It’s just girls, and the reason for that is because we don’t have a lot of girls in our field,” she said. “… it’s rising, the number of girls that we have, but we don’t have enough. We’re encouraging them … and hopefully they pick our college at some point.”
This summer program is “a branch of the MESA program,” Yohannes-Reda said.
She said has been involved with MESA for 15 years, and last year, through MESA, she served about 1,500 students, from Paramount, Long Beach, Bellflower, Los Angeles and Artesia, Bloomfield and Carmenita Unified School Districts.
At the closing ceremony, the girls’ families joined them for dinner and awards. Each girl was presented with a personal award from the four resident assistants and the three high school girls who were also living with the middle school participants.
A handful of the 20 girls, which actually became 19 after one girl went home sick on the first night, stood up to thank everyone involved with the program for the experience, and some of the girls cried because the weekend had come to a close.
Several of the girls said they hoped they would be able to come back next summer. Yohannes-Reda said she is launching a new program this fall, which will be a mentoring program for STEM students, and she is hoping to see many of the girls who attended “Future Girls @ The Beach” apply for this new program.
Yohannes-Reda said that the phrase “Future Girls” in the program’s title is particularly important for the mission of the program.
“That’s who we are, and it should be known that women are entering the field starting very young.”