Sarah and Megan Willens — twin sisters and Adlai E. Stevenson High School freshmen — are not sure about their career paths yet but their father, Ken, wants them exposed to opportunities with a promising future.
“I want them to learn about science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) because it’s very important now,” Ken Willens, a sales engineer from Riverwoods, said. “It is going to be very useful for them. For me, it was a lot of on-the-job training.”
The Willens were among 161 participants in the College of Lake County’s 11th STEM for Girls event Saturday on the Grayslake campus, where the teens got hands-on experience and the adults heard from a panel of experts.
Matt Lorenzo, the college’s healthcare program manager, said this year’s gathering was the first one in four years because of the coronavirus pandemic. It is a chance for girls from seventh grade through high school seniors to learn more about STEM.
“It’s an opportunity for them to get exposure to careers in STEM, from engineering to dissecting (an animal’s) brain, to a nursing simulation lab with manikins,” Lorenzo said. “This is all about getting them interested at an early age.”
After listening to comments from members of the college faculty and women working in STEM fields, the teens chose two 50-minute sessions where they engaged in activities ranging from toy making to analyzing food, and from physics to astronomy and more.
Julia Peterson, the associate dean of the engineering, math and physical sciences division at the college, said it is important to expose middle and high school girls to the wide variety of potential careers in STEM.
“We want to expose the girls to opportunities for careers in STEM and what we teach here,” she said. “There’s industrial technology, medical healthcare, life sciences and math careers.”
Overall, the percentage of women in STEM fields is low. Jan Edwards, an engineering professor at the college who led one of the breakout sessions, said more exposure at a young age may help change that.
“About 15% of the students in my classes are women,” Edwards said. “It’s about 19% nationally in the field. We have to change perceptions. It’s important for women to see people they can identify with.”
Ken Willens said increasing the number of women in STEM fields is long overdue. The gender gap has been closed in other professions, and the time for modification in fields like engineering has arrived.
“You have to understand more than 50% of the people in our country are women,” he said. “That means half the people in STEM should be women.”
Sylvia Johnson Jones, the executive director of community and workforce partnerships at the Career and Job Placement Center at the college, brought her niece, Asia Scaifa, a Viking Middle School student in Gurnee, to the event.
Scaifa said she hopes to have a career as an anesthesiologist or in nursing. She said she went to the event to learn more about the profession and get a sense of what it might be like.
Jones said she wants to give Scaifa exposure to the healthcare profession. Jones also wants to see the gender ratio in STEM jobs narrowed. STEM for girls is one way to help it happen, she said.
“Girls need more exposure,” Jones said, “It’s very important to get them involved and have experiences like these, so they can see the value of STEM.”
During her breakout session, Edwards gave the participants parts to make a toy, including wheels and a motor to get them to move. In another session, nursing professor Colleen Milburn was overseeing girls working with manikins with some human traits.
“They can show a pulse and breathe,” Milburn said, as machines indicated heart rates. “They are doing this in a real-life, safe environment.”
