Crouching over the microscope, Janine Morgan steadied its focus just as she had done so many times prior with her toy kit at home.
With her eyes trained intently on the eyepiece lens, she offered only slight nudges to the slide clamped on its stage before pausing suddenly.
“I think I’ve got something,” the 13-year-old boasted to her two new friends, now crowding ever closer. “It’s really hairy.”
Looking back at her was bacillus megaterium—a fungus used in agriculture to enhance plant growth.
For the University of Houston environmental engineering graduate students scattered throughout the lab where Morgan was fixed on her microscope, the tiny fungus was a familiar sight. To Morgan, it was just one of many exercises she has eagerly participated in during the Cullen College of Engineering’s Girls Reaching and Demonstrating Excellence (GRADE) Camp.
Enriching Young Minds
Centered on discovery, the weeklong day camp provides girls entering grades eight-12 with a full agenda of hands-on activities intended to open their eyes to science and engineering.
The girls often cite a love for building things, math and science as the main reasons they devote part of their summer to experiencing what GRADE camp can offer.
Now in its sixth year, more than 580 girls have gone through the program. With each year popularity grows—forcing the camp to expand from two, one-week sessions to five.
One look at the week’s agenda gives a clue as to why.
Summer sessions challenge girls to build working speakers out of Styrofoam plates and magnets, collect and analyze water samples from a nearby pond, build motors using batteries and wire and pause for a few Bingo games on circuit boards arranged just like Bingo cards.
There is the scream lab where they learn about sound waves. Girls fiddle with the frequency and amplitude on a function generator and watch how the sound waves change on an oscilloscope. Before ending the lab the girls hook up a speaker to the devices—turning the speaker into a microphone and belting renditions of their favorite songs, their best whistles and other chatter—as they watch how their voices change the waves.
In addition to all this, girls spend most afternoons focused on robotics. They build Lego Mindstorm robots, giving them their own flavor, while mastering how to program them to autonomously navigate a maze. It’s all in preparation for a presentation for their parents and teachers late in the week.
Achieving a clean run of the maze; however, is by no means simple as 16-year-old Isabel Rodriguez and her partner, 15-year-old Stacey Lau learned. The two girls were pouring through an instruction manual on a recent afternoon, trying to debug their light sensor to flawlessly complete the course by reading a line along the right side of the maze wall.
Although a challenge, girls like Rodriguez and Lau were not at all frustrated by the setback, but rather almost more excited then if it had run properly during its first test.
“I just love to problem solve, and that’s what this is all about,” Rodriguez explained. “It challenges my ability to think about the problem. Without a doubt, this has been my favorite part of camp.”
A Bigger Purpose
Aside from all the hands-on fun, instructors set out to give girls something bigger—the confidence to pursue a career in the male dominated field of engineering.
Throughout the week, campers interact with professionals in the field and are taught about the different engineering disciplines associated with this career path, which uses math and science to discover solutions to problems.
“There is a definite deficit of women in engineering mostly because they simply aren't exposed to the field whereas boys are encouraged early to pursue math, science and engineering,” said GRADE Camp Director Allison Swenson, noting the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Census data indicates only about 11 percent of the engineering workforce is comprised of women."The same enthusiasm these boys have is lacking when it comes to our young girls. Our mission, here at GRADE Camp, is to introduce the girls to engineering and hopefully ignite a life-long interest."
Many come to camp never knowing a woman engineer, but leave having interacted with dozens.
Female engineering graduate students and faculty guide some of the activities attended throughout the day and the campers eat lunch with women working in the industry.
Girls even get to know female undergraduate engineering students who serve as their mentors. These UH students are assigned to a group of five campers and cater to them throughout the duration of the camp week. Pursuing degrees in a variety of engineering disciplines, these student mentors share their college experiences, advice and inspiration with the girls.
The student mentors and industry professionals devote their time to allow campers to see women, similar to them, that have chosen to pursue this less traveled path.
As Jessica Gray, a mentor and sophomore chemical engineering student, puts it “they are there to reinforce that engineering is a reachable career goal for women.”
Inspiring Ingenuity
Engaging activities coupled with the dedication of these mentors is exactly what has motivated many former campers to follow in their mentors footsteps and pursue a career in engineering.
This summer, it’s what inspired Arjumand Alvi. Before camp had even ended for the week, the 16-year-old rising high school senior had made her mind up to major in engineering when she attends college next year.
“This camp really helped me,” said Alvi of choosing her major. “The activities and people have really been inspiring. They have made me excited about the possibilities in engineering, specifically aerospace engineering.”
Every year there are more and more like Alvi.
Since its inception in 2003, some 67 percent have gone on to pursue degrees in engineering, science, technology or mathematics after camp. Of those, about 79 percent are pursuing engineering. Girls who choose to attend UH to study engineering after camp are eligible to collect a unique, one-time $1,000 scholarship as freshman.
Now a sophomore mechanical engineering major, Cezanne Narcisse was among those to take advantage of the scholarship and an engineering education at UH after attending GRADE Camp one summer in high school. The activities she participated in and the mentoring she received, Narcisse said, really opened her eyes to what she perceives as a perfect career fit.
“I came in just interested in it, but came out knowing I wanted to go into engineering,” said Narcisse, who decided to pay it forward—devoting the last five weeks to mentoring campers herself this summer. “When I came I learned a lot. It was such a great experience and it really made me pumped about engineering. I wanted to show these girls the same thing.”
Just like Narcisse and Alvi, Swenson said, the camp has many girls looking at engineering in a new way.
“I know the camp is a success when the girls' feedback and performances at the end of the week show they have a clear understanding of engineering,” Swenson said. “By the time they finish, the campers have seen how they are capable of succeeding even when confronted with difficult, and often times, new material. Our post-camp surveys often reveal many who weren't even considering engineering definitely are by camp's end. To that point, I'm proud to say we have five former GRADE campers attending UH and majoring in engineering this fall.”