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NEWS & IDEAS
March 2000
A Guide to Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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IN MARCH, THE NATION CELEBRATES WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH. THIS MONTH'S TIP SHEET IS DEDICATED TO WOMEN'S RESEARCH AND EDUCATION AT RENSSELAER.
EDUCATION:
Girls design their future
BUSINESS:
A girl's guide to high tech
SCIENCE:
Surveying the sky
EDUCATION:
Happy in high tech
EDUCATION:
Girls design their future
"Design Your Future Day," an annual event that draws more than 300 11th-grade girls to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from around New York state, has become pivotal in creating a pipeline for young women to choose high-tech careers.
Held on March 25, 2000, the event pairs girls, many from underrepresented minority groups, with Rensselaer mentors who encourage the youngsters to study engineering, math, and science. Ernst & Young, a world-leading business consulting firm, committed $75,000 to the program for the next three years.
To capture the attention of young girls, Rensselaer's "Design Your Future Day" includes seminars such as:
Engineering a Good Hair Day: Girls will reverse engineer a hair dryer.
Who Wants to Be A Billionaire?: A spoof of the game show examines how information systems are used every day.
Made to Order: Girls use an industrial injection molder to manufacture key chains.
Nuts and Bolts of E-Commerce: Girls assemble computer disk drives into a high-performance information storage system.
Rensselaer has admitted 100 percent of the young women who applied to the university as a result of their experience at "Design Your Future Day."
"Rensselaer's enrollment numbers for women and interest in engineering and high-tech by high school girls are all on the rise," says Vicki Lynn, who created the event and directs the Women @ Rensselaer Mentor Program. "We expect programs like 'Design Your Future Day' will grow exponentially with the success of our women graduates."
For more information about "Design Your Future Day," go to: http://www.eng.rpi.edu/WWW/wit/dyfd/
Contact: Vicki Lynn (518) 276-6203, [email protected]
BUSINESS:
A girl's guide to high tech
Pique your daughter's interest in science, math, and technology early in life and she'll be more likely to choose a high-tech career, says Vicki Lynn, who directs the Women @ Rensselaer Mentor Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
"Most important, help her to seek out a mentor," Lynn says. "The job market in this new millennium is increasingly a woman's world. Young girls need mentors they can identify with, look up to, and ask questions of."
In preparing young girls to be successful in high-tech careers, Lynn offers the following tips:
Expose your daughter early to science museums. Take her to the Smithsonian, or the local planetarium or aquarium, for example. Most important-get involved.
Support her participation in national and local science awards programs, such as Odyssey of the Mind, U.S. First, and MathCOUNTS.
Enroll your daughter in a summer computer camp, or a science and technology camp. Many offer scholarships and are hosted by major universities with high-tech programs.
Encourage your daughter to take as much advanced math and science as is offered at her school. Some advanced placement classes are offered on college campuses where she can get a preliminary experience of college life.
Encourage her participation in sports. Early experience will teach her valuable lessons in competition, leadership, and teamwork.
Encourage her to take a public speaking course and volunteer for leadership positions in school or the community.
Help her develop early entrepreneurial skills. By starting a small business, such as dog walking or baby-sitting, she will learn how to value her services, and market her skills.
Contact: Vicki Lynn (518) 276-6203, [email protected]
SCIENCE:
Surveying the sky
Astronomers have long suspected that our home galaxy, the 100-billion-star Milky Way, has a gluttonous appetite for its smaller neighbors, and research by Heidi Newberg and her colleagues in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has confirmed it.
"The Milky Way is accreting small galaxies. We're eating galaxies all the time," said the associate professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The Sloan Survey is the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. It will map in detail one-quarter of the sky, and determine the positions and brightness of more than 100 million celestial objects.
Newberg came to Rensselaer after seven years at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She remains a principal software writer with the Sloan project, which she described as "a very large survey of the sky, a cosmic census, 10,000 square degrees. That's one-quarter of the sky."
Newberg and other Fermilab scientists constructed the Sloan's data acquisition system to process the expected 20 terabytes of data to be accumulated during its five-year span. The survey has already discovered four of the five most distant quasars ever identified. Researchers also located the second known methane brown dwarf, an obscure object smaller than a star and larger than a planet.
In addition, Sloan researchers have learned that the unseen dark matter-or halos-that surround galaxies are about twice as large as previously believed.
"The idea is to get a million galaxies, 100,000 quasars, tens of thousands of galactic stars. It's a big, big project," Newberg said.
Contact: Heidi Newberg, (518) 276-2652, [email protected]
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