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March 6, 2006 Vol. 77, no. 8S
Middle-school
girls explore careers in transportation engineering, thanks to Techbridge
and CEE team
If it weren’t for the intervention of two teachers who saw her potential, Megan Smirti might not have studied engineering. “No one in my family was an engineer, so I didn’t really have anyone to encourage me in that direction. But in high school, the heads of our math and science departments told me engineering was something I could do and mentored me,” says the CEE graduate student in transportation studies. “They really motivated me.” Since then, encouraging women in engineering has become Smirti’s passion. As an undergraduate engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, she was involved in mentoring and worked as a peer advisor. When she moved to Berkeley last fall to start her graduate work, Smirti wanted to increase her outreach activities. She read about Techbridge in a local newspaper. An outreach program run by Chabot Space and Science Center, Techbridge encourages girls to get involved in technology, science and engineering. The organization was looking for female role models to meet with local girls and tell them about engineering careers. Smirti signed up. At Techbridge’s two-hour training session, she was paired with CEE alumna Jessica Greig (M.S.’02), now a transportation engineer at San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority. The two spent a few hours on their own time planning a presentation and hands-on activity. In January, they found themselves at Bohannon Middle School in San Lorenzo. In front of a classroom of girls, the two talked about their personal journey into engineering and gave a mini lesson about transportation engineering. Then they led a tour of the neighborhood around Bohannon to observe its “walkability.” The two women pointed out unsafe crosswalks, and a lack of curb cuts that made it difficult for disabled people to navigate, as well as other hazards. The middle-schoolers jumped right in, taking pictures of hazards they saw. On the way back to school, the engineers invited the girls to take turns doing a simulated blind walk to learn firsthand what it’s like to walk down a sidewalk without sight. “It was really fun to see the girls latch onto different safety issues around their school and be able to see in the field what we talked about in the presentation,” says Greig. Afterward, the class suggested writing a letter about their concerns to city officials. The trip to Bohannon also achieved some larger goals. “At the end of the day, a lot of girls asked me about college and what I studied,” says Smirti. “They asked about Cal. It was exciting to hear eighth-grade girls aspire to college-level engineering programs.”
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