Student volunteers from Columbia Engineering’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE) assimilated army with internal nonprofit ThinkSTEAM on Nov 12 to horde an afternoon pattern plea seminar that introduced dual dozen girls from area center schools to a vast creativity of engineering.
The seminar began with an course on a many facets of a field, followed by an interactive debate of Columbia Engineering Professor Sunil Agrawal’s automatic engineering lab, where a girls saw technologies used in organic reconstruction for adults and children with neural disorders. Demonstrations also enclosed cable-actuated reconstruction robots and an active leg exoskeleton.
“Being means to see a labs during Columbia Engineering was a good experience, and saying a drudge that helps people who have had a cadence travel again was generally cool,” pronounced Catherine Menten, an eighth-grader during Cavallini Middle School in New Jersey.
Later, a girls competed in a fast pattern plea in that they built tables from journal stout adequate to bear stacks of textbooks. They also listened from a row of SWE members, who gave them recommendation on next in high school, removing into college, and building a skillsets indispensable to take limit advantage of opportunities in engineering. Following a panel, they had a possibility to make their possess smoothies on a self-powered smoothie bike brought by ThinkSTEAM, a New York-based nonprofit founded by high-school tyro Jothi Ramaswamy, that seeks to couple a humanities with normal STEM fields.
“The SWE eventuality enabled me to pinpoint what we would like to do in engineering and what form of engineering we would be meddlesome in,” Menten said.
For a volunteers, including members of SWE’s village overdo committee, such events offer an event to inspire splendid immature women to try STEM fields and to see how people in these fields can make a certain grant to society.
“We were so vehement to combine with Jothi Ramaswamy, owner of ThinkSTEAM, to horde a seminar on campus,” pronounced Ariana Almazan ’۱۸, SWE’s village overdo chair. “It’s always moving to see a girls work together, ask questions, and uncover how truly intent and meddlesome they are.”
—By Jesse Adams
