A Continuous Series Of Outreach Programs To Recruit Young Women To Engineering

The Rochester Institute of Technology’s Women Engineering program (WE@RIT) has developed a continuous series of outreach programs for young women in grades 6-12. The sequence has been developed partly to help recruit more women applicants to RIT’s predominantly male student body and partly in response to parent requests for more programs for their daughters. Events include Park and Ride, a 6 and 7 grade amusement park design program; Expanding Your Horizons, an 8-10 grade engineering and science conference; the SWE Sleepover, an introduction to Engineering at RIT for 11 grade women; Colleges and Careers, a summer recruiting workshop for 12 graders; and I Built My Computer @ RIT, a summer camp for 1 year women engineering students accepted to RIT. An overview of all five programs is presented here, but the focus of this paper will be the Park & Ride and Expanding Your Horizons workshops, which are new as of 2004. Background and Motivation Increasing the diversity among those who graduate with engineering degrees is essential for providing a strong workforce for the nation’s high technology industries. In particular, women comprise 50% of the population, but fewer than 20% choose to major in subjects such as computer, electrical and mechanical engineering. NSF recently reported that, while the number of women enrolling as freshmen in full-time engineering programs increased by nearly 2,000 from 1994-2002, the percentage of female freshmen engineering students dropped from 19.4% to 17.2%. At RIT, the percentage of women engineering students graduating each year from the Kate Gleason College of Engineering is approximately 11%, significantly below the 2003 national average of 20.4%. However, unlike the national trends in engineering student attrition, the overall retention rate for this relatively small group of RIT engineering women is actually higher than the retention rates associated with their majority male peers, although both groups fall below RIT’s long-term student retention goals. Our demonstrated ability to keep women here once they decide to come indicates that RIT is an excellent place to work at bringing more women into engineering.