By Addison Martin
Women in Science and Engineering, a program at the University of Iowa, will now expand its outreach thanks to a new affiliation with the nationally recognized Femineer program of California Polytechnic University-Pomona.
Chelle Lehman, the WiSE codirector for recruitment and outreach, said she first heard about the program in March at a national conference for another program she works with called Project Lead the Way.
“Cal Poly-Pomona is also an affiliate for [Lead the Way], so [its officials] were at this nationwide Project Lead the Way summit, and they were doing a presentation about Femineers, and so that was the first time I had heard about it,” Lehman said. “I had a school that was very interested in it, and we were talking after the session, and they said, ‘We need this in Iowa; you need a find a way to get this in Iowa.’ ”
WiSE is a UI program that focuses on helping females in all the STEM majors, despite its name specifying just science and engineering. While it has a student organization involved in community outreach that includes K-12 development, Lehman said, the affiliation will be wholly focused on junior high and high school.
“In the past, there’s been a focus on the on-campus programs for undergraduate and graduate students, and this takes that excitement, that engagement, that exposure — I love that word ‘exposure’ — to a younger level and lets [students] explore those career opportunities,” Lehman said.
Gerri Cole, the outreach-program director of the Cal Poly-Pomona College of Engineering, where the program was created, has implemented it in a local school and seen an increased interest in STEM majors in girls and young women.
“From our cohort group, when they finished the program this past year, half of them graduated, and the other half are seniors this year,” Cole said. “Of the half that graduated, 50 percent have decided to pursue STEM majors, and we are ecstatic about that.”
Both women involved in this affiliation were STEM majors themselves. They said the lack of encouragement for young women to get involved in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematical areas sparked them to help young women to get interested in the important fields.
Rojahn Kakavandi, a young woman who has benefited from WiSE — specifically the Be-WiSE Living Learning Community in the UI dormitories — is now the president of the WiSE student organization WiSE Ambassadors.
“It provided me with that sense of community, and that was really one of the things that was really important when classes were getting rough … knowing that there was a community there to support me,” she said.
As the president of the WiSE Ambassadors, Kakavandi said she hopes she can continue to help girls get as excited about science as she was as a child. To her, it’s important that young women feel represented in these fields as a way to encourage them to follow that career path.
“Looking up and seeing women your age, and the grade above that, and the grade above that, all the way up to your dream professional career, you feel like you’re represented in that field,” she said. “Seeing there’s someone just like me doing that.”