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Engineering Career Day For Girls Brings Women Into Profession
As a high school junior, Eva Sajdak was good at math and science. But even after being a semi-finalist in a national competition, the soon-to-be valedictorian wasn't sure that scientific research was for her.
"I'm more of a big-picture person, and I wanted to deal with large-scale systems," Sajdak recalled. "My physics teacher was really great, and he suggested engineering."
Engineering has lagged behind the other professions in attracting women into its ranks. While women now account for a quarter of all physicians and lawyers, only about one in 10 engineers is female. Engineering distantly trails even the physical sciences, where women now make up 22 percent of the workforce.
Nobody in Sajdak's family -- and certainly no women -- were engineers. Her two older sisters were both CPAs.
So Sajdak, as part of her "investigative process" four years ago, attended an engineering career day for girls, hosted by Northwestern University's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
"I learned what engineering would be like, day to day, and that it isn't as scary as some people make it," Sajdak said. "People always talk about the 'nerdy' engineer, but at Career Day I met all these great women, from all kinds of diverse backgrounds, making a difference. I could see myself wanting to do that."
Today Sajdak is a junior in the McCormick School, majoring in industrial engineering. She has already worked on the sort of large-scale system that attracted her to engineering. During a summer internship at Motorola, she helped design and implement a Web database used to evaluate the capacity of a cellular phone network. "People use it every day," she said proudly.
She is also president of Northwestern's chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, which co-sponsors Career Day with McCormick. This year Career Day is on Feb. 27. Two hundred high school and junior high girls are expected to attend with their parents and teachers.
Career Day seems to be working -- this year's freshman class at McCormick is 36 percent female, the highest ever.
Career Day features laboratory tours, hands-on experiments and a goal-setting workshop. It has been held at Northwestern annually since 1970, when only 4 percent of the students in the McCormick School were women. Today, one-third of McCormick students are women, putting it atop the Big Ten's engineering schools and among the nation's leaders in the percentage of women it enrolls. McCormick also has one of the highest percentages of women faculty members among major engineering schools.
"Career Day was definitely one of the reasons I came to Northwestern and one of the reasons I decided to pursue engineering," Sajdak said. But a perceptive teacher or other mentor, she said, is also crucial for a girl to recognize the tremendous opportunities and satisfaction that engineering offers women.
"For me, one of the turning points was my physics teacher talking to me about it," she said. "You really need someone to suggest it. Otherwise, it might not even occur to
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