Science & Health

Cooper Union Grooms Girls for STEM Careers

Giving in to her parents’ wishes, Kavya Udupa, a ninth-grader then, reluctantly took her first computer class in C++, an all-purpose computer programming language. She liked it more than she expected.

Now 16, Udupa not only loves computers, she’s also exploring career possibilities in science, technology, engineering and math, a group commonly referred to as STEM. To prepare for that eventual career, Udupa signed up for six weeks of learning engineering design through the summer 2014 Cooper Union Summer STEM Program for high school students.

Of the 144 summer STEM students, 56 were girls. That means girls made up 38.9 percent of the summer STEM students.

In the workplace, however, women make up a smaller percentage of STEM workers overall, according to a 2013 U.S. Census Bureau report.

Udupa has noticed that gender gap. She also knows there is a national push to bring more women and girls into the STEM fields.

“There’s so much untapped potential in these great minds,” Udupa said. “And without their knowledge and capacity, the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field will not and cannot achieve the great things that it should.”

One of her Cooper Union summer classmates, Susan Zhou, 17, has a similar perspective. “With a greater diversity in gender comes a greater diversity in ideas. With more ideas comes more advanced, quicker and smarter technology. It can only benefit the world if more females enter STEM fields.”

What Udupa and Zhou were learning at Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering helps build their belief that females should pursue STEM careers, reducing the gender gap in what historically has been a male-dominated sector.

George Delagrammatikas, director of Cooper Union’s summer STEM program for high school students, said, “Biology and chemistry are hard sciences, fields women are used to, which is why it’s important to get them into programs like computer science which need more gender diversity.”

Delagrammatikas, associate dean of Cooper Union’s mechanical engineering department, teaches Introduction to Mechanical Engineering: The Rube Goldberg Project, one of the summer courses.

He added that women sometimes are reluctant to go into STEM because “there are not enough positive role models and there is a societal bias against them.”

According to the most recent estimate from The National Center for Women and Information Technology estimates that, as one example of the shortage of women in STEM, 18 percent of computer science graduates in the United States are women. Of that group, 32.4 percent switched majors into a non-related STEM field after only one semester in college.

According to that 2013 Census Bureau report, “Among science and engineering graduates, men are employed in a STEM occupation at twice the rate of women: 31 percent compared with 15 percent. Nearly 1 in 5 female science and engineering graduates are out of the labor force, compared with less than 1 in 10 male science and engineering graduates.”

New York University Professor Patrick Cousot’s computer science course was 22 percent female last spring. But, he said, the percentage often is as low as zero.

“Give [girls] a computer when they are young, teach them programming [not computer usage], teach them mathematics [not calculus recipes] and a reasonable percentage will be interested,” said Cousot, in an email.

Besides Cooper Union’s project, there are other girl-focused programs, including by Girls Who Code’s Summer Immersion Program and the CSAW Summer Program For Young Women in High School, aiming to entice more girls into studying STEM (CSAW stands for Cyber Security Awareness Week, a competition that began 10 years ago).

Girls Who Code has reported that 100 percent of its 380 program participants in 2012 said they planned to major in computer science in college.

Madina Radjabova, 17, a student in the Girls Who Code 2013 Summer Immersion Program, said, “Exposing girls to professional careers in the STEM fields will allow them to see how fun, creative and open the working environment really is.”

The immersion summer program allowed her “to develop strong connections and great friendships … [and] a strong support network.”

For some of participants, those programs and connections are bound to pay off. Those who graduate with degrees in computer science and other STEM fields are in high demand, regardless of their gender, according to a 2014 report from the National Science Foundation’s National Science Board Science and Engineering Indicators.

“Anyone with a Ph.D. in computer science will find a job,” NYU’s Cousot said.

“I don’t know where I’ll be ten years from now,” student Radjabova said. “But I know that computer science, and any other STEM field for that matter, will allow me to keep most doors wide open.”

As she stays on her path toward joining the STEM workforce, Udupa also plans to do her part to draw other girls and women into those fields.

“I want to act as an advocate in getting girls interested in the STEM fields,” Udupa said, talking about her future. “And the lack of females today just strengthens my passion for this.”