It's girls-only at Fresno State engineering camp

Published online on Wednesday, Jul. 15, 2009

The small computer-programmed robot made of Legos whirled in circles on the tile floor of an engineering lab at California State University, Fresno.

Seeing the robot work was a watershed moment for Richa Varughese, 16, of Clovis and Andrea Helmns, 17, of Tollhouse, who built the robot Wednesday afternoon as part of a girls-only engineering camp.

"It feels like if I can do this, I can do anything else I put my mind to," said Richa, who attends Buchanan High School.

That's exactly what Fresno State engineering professors are hoping the 23 high school girls who attended will get from the weeklong camp, which introduces them to different engineering fields.

"I want them to have success, and fun," said Nell Papavasiliou, a chemical and electrical engineer who teaches calculus to Fresno State engineering students. "I want them to feel that if they can do this, they can do other things they've never done before."

This is the first year for the girls-only engineering camp. Its goal is to increase the number of female engineering majors at Fresno State, Papavasiliou said.

Fresno State lags behind the national average in graduating female engineers.

Nationwide, about 20% of engineering graduates are women. Those numbers were higher in the past, said Michael Jenkins, dean of the Lyles College of Engineering.

"There was a lot of effort to raise the numbers [in the past], and 20 years ago the national average was 25%," he said, but the numbers have slipped back.

"There's some good research going on now into why that happened," Jenkins said.

At Fresno State, only 13% of engineering graduates are women.

Jenkins said he hopes the camp will convince girls "who might not have thought about it" that engineering is fun, and entice them to major in engineering.

Richa and Andrea didn't know each other before attending the camp. But they share a love of math and science and enjoyed getting to know each other as they figured out how to make the robot work.

"I think we made a pretty good team," Richa said.

"Yes, we really do," said Andrea, a Sierra High School student who wants to be an aerospace engineer.

Working only with girls has advantages, the girls and camp facilitators said.

"It's a really different environment," Andrea said, from being in a class with boys. "Women think similarly, but from a different perspective than boys."

If there were boys at the camp, she said, some girls "might be embarrassed to show their intelligence."

Papavasiliou, who worked as an optical engineer for Pelco before coming to Fresno State, said women can make good engineers, even if they weren't exposed to technical fields as girls.

"You hear men talk about how as kids they took apart things," she said, like small appliances. That's not necessarily a requirement to go into engineering, she said.

"I think I'm a great engineer, but as a kid I never took things apart. That's not what girls are into," Papavasiliou said. "Engineering is all about problem solving and working on projects, and women are good at that."

Angela Cox, a senior mechanical engineering major at Fresno State, walked around the lab helping the girls with their robots.

"Growing up, I didn't know what engineering was until I got to Fresno State," said Cox, who wants to work on automobile design or energy efficiency after graduation.

Women approach engineering differently, Cox said. "They're more willing to think off the path. I want to encourage the girls that, yes, you can do this."