Many high school students in upstate New York have rarely experienced engineering first-hand. Especially not chemical or biological engineering. But a graduate student-run group at Cornell is working to change that.
Every year in April, the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Graduate Women's Group (CBE Women) brings 10th through 12th graders from around the state to get hand-on experience in engineering at Cornell. Supported by the R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biological Engineering, the organization aims to provide outreach and advocacy about STEM majors and careers to young students that are starting to think about college.
Participants of the fifteenth annual Women's Outreach in Material, Energy, and Nanobiotechnology event at Cornell.
CBE Women president Youlim Ha and outreach coordinator Deana Moffat are two Ph.D. students that help lead the annual event, Women's Outreach in Material, Energy, and Nanobiotechnology. Now in its fifteenth year, the event engages high school students in lab experiments across engineering fields.
"The first lab focused on materials engineering, where students made Silly Putty and bath bombs from scratch," said Moffat of the April 12 event hosted in Olin Hall. "In the bioengineering lab, they extracted DNA from strawberries and used yeast to catalyze a soapy explosion called 'elephant toothpaste.'" The final lab highlighted process engineering where students made their own lip balms and ice cream with liquid nitrogen.
"It's really great because they get to have a hands-on experience and tangibly understand how science gets performed," said Ha. "And they also start to understand how these opportunities relate to different careers or fields they might not have known about before."
Students learn about materials engineering by mixing ingredients to create putty and both bombs as part of the Women's Outreach in Material, Energy, and Nanobiotechnology event at Cornell.
As part of the outreach day, participating parents learn about the college application process and take part in a lab about surface tension alongside their children. Later in the day, student and parents attended panel discussions with Cornell Engineering faculty and undergraduate students. "The students talk about their experience as undergraduates in STEM fields and what college is like," said Moffat. "They're close in age to the students who attend the event, so they are more relatable."
For the 19 high school attendees, the single day has a large impact. Over 85% of the students said that the event increased their interest in pursuing a STEM-related career, and remarkably, 100% of past attendees over the last 15 years have gone on to college. For the parents, they departed Cornell feeling more informed about supporting their child's interest in STEM. One parent said their daughter left thinking about a handful of specific jobs she hadn't previously considered.
In addition to Ha and Moffat, this year's event was also organized by CBE Women members Julia Donlevie, treasurer; Wenjing Tang, outreach coordinator; Marsha Kowal, faculty advisor and Smith School senior lecturer and associate director of graduate studies; and many undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral volunteers. Reum Scott, Ph.D. '19, postdoctoral associate from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering donated funds to support student travel to the event.
Melia Matthews is a freelance writer for Cornell Engineering.
