To encourage talented high school girls to consider majoring in engineering, the College put together an unusual learning and living summer experience that linked high-tech design and the natural urge to help others.
Twenty high school girls took part in a two-week women's-only engineering summer camp on campus, where they learned about the field by designing electronic toys and communication devices for severely disabled children. Participants were tenth and eleventh graders who have completed one year of math and science.
“We focused on something they could embrace immediately,” said Robert Balmer, dean of engineering and computer science. “Certainly, I think that for girls of this age and children in need there is a natural affinity.”
Program directors modeled the live-in camp-called Educating Girls as Engineers, or EDGE-on Summer Science Workshop, a camp for minority students that Union has hosted for seven years. In the first few days of the program, counselors took the girls to Northwoods at Hilltop, a local rehabilitation and care facility for the disabled. There, the girls met children whose disabilities ranged from temporary weakness caused by illness to no ability to move.
One of the EDGE students, Molly Freeman, said that after her visit, she wanted to help a wheelchair-bound nineteen-year-old Hilltop patient who only had partial use of one arm-enough to communicate using a modified computer keyboard, but not enough to touch his face. Freeman and her lab partner modified a water bottle and tube to reach from the boy's hand to his face, and created attachments like a toothbrush and washcloth for the tool.
“It won't make him independent, but it will give him something more than what he had,” said Freeman.
Meanwhile, the Summer Science Workshop exposed nearly two dozen budding scientists to college-level classroom and laboratory study, and career guidance for fields in health professions and scientific research. This year's class had students from both inner-city environments and rural towns, including three from the Capital District; eleven from New York City; five from Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Mexico; and one from Barbados.
The two-week program had HIV/AIDS as its overarching theme. The students researched the scientific, social, and political aspects of AIDS, and they gave presentations on a variety of topics related to the epidemic at the end of the program. Beyond classes and labs in immunology, computer technology and cellular biology, the students attended lectures at Albany Medical College and made field trips to the New York State Department of Health Axelrod Institute and the Double H Hole in the Woods Ranch (a camp for chronically ill children).
Since its inception in 1996, nineteen students from the program have enrolled as students at Union. Program Coordinator Karen Williams, research associate professor of biology, said, “One student from SSW '96 has just completed his first year at the New England College of Optometry, and two current Union students are in the eight-year Leadership in Medicine Program.”
The EDGE Workshop was supported by Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, Pratt & Whitney, Capital Region Robotics, the AYCO Charitable Foundation, ASME Hudson Mohawk Section, Dynamics Research Corp., the Northeast Chapter of the Society of Women Engineers and the GE Women's Network.