RENO - The College of Engineering will be hosting its first Girls in Engineering camp this summer. The weeklong camp, designed for girls ages 13-15, aims to encourage more girls to consider engineering as a career path.
"We've had a few girls go through our camps in the past, and we saw a need for these girls to have a place of their own to realize that women can be successful in engineering," said Elyse Bozsik, K-12 outreach coordinator for the college.
The camp is designed to provide an introduction to a range of engineering disciplines through hands-on, interactive lessons such as bridge building, bottle rockets and chemical engineering experiments.
"We would like young girls to understand that science and engineering are professions that females can excel in, despite common stereotypes," said Kelly Doyle, P.E., program coordinator for the Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research and a camp instructor. "We also want them to understand that engineering can be fun and interactive while promoting problem solving skills."
Bozsik said the girls camp, as well as all the college's other outreach activities, aim to combat the stereotype that engineering is just about math.
"Engineering is all about people," she said. "It's all about serving people and creating communities, for a civil engineer, making safer food, for a chemical engineer, or literally saving lives, for a biomedical engineer."
Nationwide, women received just over 18 percent of all bachelor's degrees in engineering in 2011, a number that has remained relatively flat over the past few years, according to research from the American Society for Engineering Education.
The camp will be held on the University of Nevada, Reno campus from 9 am to 3 pm, June 24 to 29. Registration fee is $250, and scholarships and financial aid are available.
For complete registration details, please visit the engineering summer camps webpage.
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