Chattanooga State hosts their annual “Girl’s STEM Day”

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) — Chattanooga State Community College hosted roughly 300 young women to attend their annual Girl’s STEM day on Friday.

“It is first come first serve, because you see, we’re really crowded, and that’s only half the group that we have today,” said Chattanooga State Assistant Professor in the Engineering and Information Technologies department, Tracie Clifford.

Young women from 8th to 12th grade were bussed over to the college campus to attend a three hour session filled with activities at the Gerald McCormick Center for Engineering, Technology, Arts and Sciences.

“These are young women from not just Hamilton County, middle and high schools. but we also invite from our outlying sectors that are in our service areas,” said Clifford.

Girl’s STEM Day is meant to give young women from middle to high school a glimpse into what it means to be an engineer as a woman in the field.

The college offers workshops in robotics, quality engineering, radiation protection and even solar vehicles.

“Girls are underrepresented in the field of engineering only somewhere around somewhere depending on what field of engineering six to twelve percent,” said Clifford.

One assistant professor explained that even though it is a male driven career, if they are interested in it, they could have just as much to offer within the field.

“We’re here to get them on the pathway to understanding that they have all the abilities to be engineers and to go into engineering careers,” said Clifford.

This event has been going on for more than a decade now.

“We’re getting close to doing this for 10 years. We would’ve been at 10 years if we hadn’t paused,” said Clifford.

An assistant professor said the most exciting part of the day is seeing the girl’s faces when told the ways they are thinking are exactly how an engineer would work through tasks using their problem solving skills.

“As they go through and they problem solve and they do critical thinking, I get to tell them, you’re thinking like an engineer, you’re doing exactly what an engineered as on a regular day,” said Clifford.