It’s time to engineer a change in students’ perceptions

Thea Sahr, Associate Director, Educational Outreach at WGBH

Imagine this scenario: You’re thinking about buying your first home. On a neighborhood drive, a house with a “For Sale” sign catches your attention. The real estate agent says: “The house needs a lot of repair. You’ll be working on it every night and weekend. The rooms are small. It’s overpriced. There’s no convenient public transportation. And so on and so on…”  Would you make an appointment to see the house?  It’s unlikely. 

Now imagine this scenario: You’re a high school student thinking about studying engineering. You decide to talk to the one engineer you vaguely know and this is what he says: “You have to excel in math and science. The course work is really hard.  It may include some of the toughest courses the school offers. You’ll be studying all the time. It’s really tough going.” Would you choose engineering as your college major? Probably not, unless you’re a glutton for punishment.

The first scenario was fiction. The second scenario, sadly, occurs day after day, in every corner of this nation. When it comes to engineering, as cartoonist Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” once observed, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Let’s be clear, course proficiency in math and science is important for engineering. But it’s not the first thing that young people need to hear. And, of course, engineering is hard work, but that, too, isn’t the first thing they should know. They need to hear from engineers what they, you, find fulfilling and rewarding about your chosen career. Once you have them excited about the possibilities, the path to engineering becomes more acceptable because they have a picture of the rewards that lie on the other side.

Engineering has been a focus of WGBH Boston (“public service media for New England”) programming and services for many years. In 2004 we joined a coalition of engineering associations, corporations, and universities to investigate why high school girls aren’t choosing to study engineering. The existing data told us that young women take math and science courses at the same rate (or higher) as boys, and perform as well as or better than their male peers, yet few choose to pursue engineering majors. Why?

To find out, we conducted a study and asked academically prepared high school girls what they think about engineering. The results were disheartening. They called it a “man’s job” that centered on science and math and said it “just wasn’t for them.”  To put it simply, engineering has a serious perception problem.

In this same study, we also explored what girls are looking for in a career and found that personal relevance is high on the list. Girls want collaborative and creative careers that make a difference in the world. They are looking for interesting, enjoyable, flexible jobs in good working environments. And, while these characteristics are in fact an integral part of engineering, they aren’t the ones that engineers, teachers, and guidance counselors have been highlighting. 

This research led to two initiatives: “Design Squad,” a reality TV series for middle school kids that focuses on engineering and Engineer Your Life^TM, an awareness campaign and website (www.engineeryourlife.org) designed to reposition engineering in a way that aligns with the interests and career goals of high school girls. 

The goal of Engineer Your Life is straightforward—to replace the old messages that centered on the difficult process of becoming an engineer with new messages that highlight how creative, collaborative, lucrative, and flexible an engineering career can be.

Engineer Your Life is funded by the National Science Foundation, Northrop Grumman Corporation, the United Engineering Foundation, and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., and is supported by a coalition of more than 60 partners, including the National Academy of Engineering, National Engineers Week, National Association for College Admission Counseling, Society of Women Engineers, American Society of Civil Engineers, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, National Society of Black Engineers, IBM, DuPont, University of Colorado, and Purdue University. Today it reaches thousands of high school girls (and boys) with positive messages about engineering. 

Can we inspire a new generation of engineers? Yes we can. But it won’t be easy. It requires an army of ambassadors prepared to carry the new messages. We implore every engineer to visit www.engineeryourlife.org, and its “For Engineers” section to learn about these new messages and how to inspire girls (and boys) to consider engineering. Tell your colleagues about it.  Link your website—even your correspondence—to www.engineeryourlife.org. Host an Engineer Your Life table at a college fair. Talk to young people and tell them how engineers are changing the world all the time. Tell them you are dreaming up creative, practical solutions while working with other smart, inspiring people to invent, design and build things that matter. Tell them what you love about being an engineer.

As long as young people misunderstand engineering, they won’t choose it for their future.  As a nation, we accept the status quo at our peril.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.