-
STEM Puts Down Roots
Now in its third year, Bryn Mawr's STEM Career Fair helps to inspire the scientists, engineers and makers of tomorrow
By Emily Pan ’16
On Saturday, November 14, Rebecca Harris ’03 came home.
She didn’t come as a student, of course—she hasn’t been one for many years—but she also came as more than an alumna. Harris is an environmental scientist at Century Engineering, where she helps to design facilities that will later be constructed across the mid-Atlantic. Like the several other Bryn Mawr alumnae in the KVB Gym that day, she came to speak to students who are currently in the same position she was more than a decade ago.
Three years ago, Bryn Mawr held its first STEM Career Fair specifically aimed at introducing high school students to the many STEM career options available and to the women working in them. This year, Bryn Mawr teamed up with the state of Maryland to offer the official Maryland STEM Career Fair for Girls. As in the past, representatives from dozens of companies and organizations came to introduce their work to the student attendees. Hundreds of girls from schools around the Baltimore area arrived to speak to women with careers in science, technology, engineering, and math—fields fast expanding in this increasingly digital age, but trailing when it comes to the representation of women in their respective workforces. The goal of the fair is to give students a chance to explore the possibilities available to them and to speak with some of the people who are paving the way for those possibilities.
It can be easy at a place like the STEM Fair to feel totally lost, to look at all of these self-assured women with real careers and wonder exactly how they got there. It can be easy to think that maybe the paths these women have taken were always set in stone; that we, the students, are the only hopelessly indecisive ones, and that our uncertainty is something shared only by our peers. But when Harris describes her high school experience, it sounds like something plenty of students are living right now. “I wasn’t sure I was interested in engineering,” she explained. "I knew I liked science, and I tried a bunch of different internships, but I didn’t know I wanted to be in engineering until after I graduated.”
It’s nice to be reminded every once in a while that it’s okay to be unsure.
And like many of the other activities promoted by Bryn Mawr’s extensive STEM initiative, the fair is not intended to set students down a single path—only to spark the sort of interest that may one day fuel a career. “We don’t expect our girls to choose a career in finance,” said Lexi Mills, program director of Invest in Girls, an organization that has partnered with Bryn Mawr for the past three years to teach students about financial literacy. “But it’s amazing to watch once they’re in our workshops and learning things, getting exposed to different careers—lightbulbs go off, and they either say 'Oh my God, this is amazing, I love this,' or they say, 'You know what? This isn’t for me, but I’m glad I was here.’”
There were plenty of reasons to be glad to be there: a basket filled with free packets of Old Bay, a light-strewn table stacked with photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, a house plan printed in glow-in-the-dark plastic, some buildings of modular cardboard, a gallery of horns and furs and shells confiscated from poachers and repurposed for education. There was a lot to wonder at for both the STEM-obsessed and those who sit more on the fence.
Banner: Junior Emilie Berman chats with one of the female volunteers at the STEM Career Fair.
Top: Three girls complete an activity at one of the booths.
Bottom: Senior Sydney Nemphos presents the poster from her summer internship.
Below: Senior Hannah Gokaslan shows off her summer work during the poster session.
Top: Three girls complete an activity at one of the booths.
Bottom: Senior Sydney Nemphos presents the poster from her summer internship.
Below: Senior Hannah Gokaslan shows off her summer work during the poster session.
It wasn’t just the women from so many companies and organizations demonstrating the cool things they’d created, either. At one stand, members of the Bryn Mawr Upper School robotics team showed off a robot they’d built to clear an obstacle course for an upcoming competition. “Yesterday, we actually just got our pull-up done, and it’s pretty intense, I think,” said Serena Thaw-Poon ’18. “We have a competition coming up in January at Bryn Mawr, so we need volunteers and attendees, if you guys want to come help.”
When the presenters left the gym to take a lunch break, attendees were encouraged to visit Centennial Hall lobby to take a look at more of their peers’ work. Bryn Mawr students who’d spent the summer as interns and volunteers presented posters detailing their efforts, which ranged from studying the eutrophication of water bodies to working as tour guides at the National Aquarium to shadowing at an investment management firm. Each student was on hand to answer questions from attendees.
One of the presenters was Sydney Nemphos ’16, who spent the last summer interning in the lab of Cynthia Bearer, Division Head of Pediatric Neonatology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where she researched the effect of bilirubin on the brains of mice. She glows when she speaks about her mentor; she glows slightly less when talking about the one time she watched as a postdoc dispatched lab mice for the sake of scientific study. But overall, Nemphos is overwhelmingly enthusiastic about her time in Dr. Bearer’s lab, and her work has clearly paid off. "I’m going to be published in two papers, actually,” she said. "It’s awesome.”
Sometimes, when so many brilliant women materialize behind tables at a fair, it’s hard to imagine where they came from, who they might have been as girls, how they ever managed to muddle their way from the chaos of high school to an actual career. But then you look at the girls who are still here, what they’re doing even as high schoolers—building robots, doing research, getting published in scientific papers—and it’s not hard to see some of them coming home to Bryn Mawr sometime in the future, just like Rebecca Harris, bringing all the knowledge they’ve gathered back to share with a new generation of girls.
Each summer, Bryn Mawr works with local STEM organizations and businesses to place girls in experiential learning internships. Last summer, a total of 21 girls took part in opportunities at organizations like Johns Hopkins University, Brown Advisory, Girls Who Code, the Center for American Indian Health and more. Below, two of the participants share their stories.
Amalia Bilis '16
This past summer I had the opportunity to intern at the Brown Advisory Investment Firm located in Fells Point. I was selected to participate along with a student from Roland Park Country School after having been a part of the Invest in Girls financial literacy program for two years. I became interested in this internship because I wanted to build on my financial knowledge and experience the realities of working in an investment firm.
Over the course of three weeks, I met with sixteen different departments and worked on two projects regarding financial literacy and professions in finance. Each day began at the Morning Meeting, which was a time for the different departments to discuss a topic that was going to impact the firm and their clients – for example, sustainable investing, approaching risk and emerging markets. Afterward, my partner and I would attend two job shadows, where we met with employees from different departments to learn what they do, their impact on the firm and how their roles connect to other departments. In addition, we worked on two projects throughout the three weeks. The first was a "Finglish" project. This financial term combines the words “finance” and “English.” For this project, we took articles from The Wall Street Journal and translated them into terms that our peers would be able to understand.
For our longer-term project we created a presentation entitled “The Importance of Women as Professionals in Finance.” We discussed how early financial literacy is instrumental to the development of female professionals in the financial industry. Throughout this project, our research suggested that women are more likely to be financially illiterate than men and have more financial troubles. Women with lower levels of financial literacy proved to have worse credit card behaviors than men with low levels of financial literacy. Other statistics showed that fewer women have the resources to pursue learning about fiscal endeavors. One article stated that women with low financial literacy levels were 32 percent more likely than men to fall into financial predicaments. In response to the low numbers of financially literate women, the United States government has created two financial literacy programs for women that focus on savings and retirement.
This internship helped me realize the importance of having resources to improve one’s financial literacy at a younger age and how necessary it is for students to learn about fiscal matters in order to be prepared when it comes time to handle their own money. Invest in Girls has given me a foundation of financial knowledge, and my experience at Brown Advisory helped me see that if I had not been given tools to improve my financial literacy, I would not have taken it upon myself to learn about the economic world.
This past summer I had the opportunity to intern at the Brown Advisory Investment Firm located in Fells Point. I was selected to participate along with a student from Roland Park Country School after having been a part of the Invest in Girls financial literacy program for two years. I became interested in this internship because I wanted to build on my financial knowledge and experience the realities of working in an investment firm.
Over the course of three weeks, I met with sixteen different departments and worked on two projects regarding financial literacy and professions in finance. Each day began at the Morning Meeting, which was a time for the different departments to discuss a topic that was going to impact the firm and their clients – for example, sustainable investing, approaching risk and emerging markets. Afterward, my partner and I would attend two job shadows, where we met with employees from different departments to learn what they do, their impact on the firm and how their roles connect to other departments. In addition, we worked on two projects throughout the three weeks. The first was a "Finglish" project. This financial term combines the words “finance” and “English.” For this project, we took articles from The Wall Street Journal and translated them into terms that our peers would be able to understand.
For our longer-term project we created a presentation entitled “The Importance of Women as Professionals in Finance.” We discussed how early financial literacy is instrumental to the development of female professionals in the financial industry. Throughout this project, our research suggested that women are more likely to be financially illiterate than men and have more financial troubles. Women with lower levels of financial literacy proved to have worse credit card behaviors than men with low levels of financial literacy. Other statistics showed that fewer women have the resources to pursue learning about fiscal endeavors. One article stated that women with low financial literacy levels were 32 percent more likely than men to fall into financial predicaments. In response to the low numbers of financially literate women, the United States government has created two financial literacy programs for women that focus on savings and retirement.
This internship helped me realize the importance of having resources to improve one’s financial literacy at a younger age and how necessary it is for students to learn about fiscal matters in order to be prepared when it comes time to handle their own money. Invest in Girls has given me a foundation of financial knowledge, and my experience at Brown Advisory helped me see that if I had not been given tools to improve my financial literacy, I would not have taken it upon myself to learn about the economic world.
Anjalee Rutah ’17
This past summer, I worked with Dr. James Overduin in Towson University’s Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences. We designed, constructed and tested a model of the silent submarine depicted in the 1990 thriller, “The Hunt for Red October.” Our model had a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drive, which means that the vessel contained no moving parts and instead used onboard batteries and magnets to propel seawater salt ions out of the back of the boat, producing an equal and opposite forward thrust on the submarine, thanks to Newton’s third law. This kind of boat would be extremely useful in wartime, as it could be very hard to detect by other submarines’ sonar devices.
Our main objectives were to optimize the boat’s velocity and to determine why, to our knowledge, no Navy has yet exploited such a seemingly revolutionary propulsion system for the purposes of national defense. A formula was found and the variables within the equation were calculated and modified over the course of experimentation. During this process, we also measured different variables that would remain constant during the experiment. For example, I used a Bell Model 9200 gaussmeter to measure the strength of the vertical component of the magnetic field at multiple points inside the thruster tube and then calculated the average. We also tried to replicate seawater, as that is what a real-life submarine would be submerged in, so we used 99.8% pure pool salt to produce replica seawater with a concentration of approximately 35 parts per million.
In the end, a predicted boat speed of 12 cm/s was calculated, which compared rather poorly with the average experimental speed of 1.4 cm/s. From this, we have identified a number of factors that may help to explain why a scaled-up model might not quite function as depicted in the film. One idea is that the theory and observation are mutually exclusive, meaning our theoretical model is likely too simplistic. Another major problem we encountered during experimentation is that the internal resistance of the batteries caused the current to rapidly drop during the test runs, and in order to have an adequate energy supply, a submarine with an MHD drive would have to have a generator – which defeats the purpose of making a large-scale silent propulsion system in the first place. Therefore, although an MHD drive would prove extremely useful in theory, more research is needed to understand exactly why it does not function as well as expected.
I decided to do this internship because I wanted to explore more about a topic that really intrigues me, and also to find out if physics is a field that I want to pursue later. I also wanted to gain some experience working in a formal lab setting and conducting research. By doing an internship, I knew I would also be able to network with the people there and get references that I might be able to use in the future.
Going into my internship, I was nervous, because although I enjoy the field of physics, it is not my go-to field when I think about my future career. However, as I continued working with Dr. Overduin and on the project, I became more and more intrigued. My major takeaway from this experience is that you should remain open-minded when going into an internship and not have any preconceived notions. If I had walked in telling myself that this is not what I want to do in life, then my experience would not have been as great as it was.
I would encourage a student who might not be sure if an internship is right for her to explore the options Bryn Mawr offers because students have a lot of say in what they want. Dr. Elton works hard to find an internship that each student will enjoy based on her interests. Also, the knowledge that you gain from the experience of having an internship is not solely academic. You learn a lot about yourself – or at least I did – in terms of what interests you and really what you might want to explore futher.
This past summer, I worked with Dr. James Overduin in Towson University’s Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences. We designed, constructed and tested a model of the silent submarine depicted in the 1990 thriller, “The Hunt for Red October.” Our model had a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drive, which means that the vessel contained no moving parts and instead used onboard batteries and magnets to propel seawater salt ions out of the back of the boat, producing an equal and opposite forward thrust on the submarine, thanks to Newton’s third law. This kind of boat would be extremely useful in wartime, as it could be very hard to detect by other submarines’ sonar devices.
Our main objectives were to optimize the boat’s velocity and to determine why, to our knowledge, no Navy has yet exploited such a seemingly revolutionary propulsion system for the purposes of national defense. A formula was found and the variables within the equation were calculated and modified over the course of experimentation. During this process, we also measured different variables that would remain constant during the experiment. For example, I used a Bell Model 9200 gaussmeter to measure the strength of the vertical component of the magnetic field at multiple points inside the thruster tube and then calculated the average. We also tried to replicate seawater, as that is what a real-life submarine would be submerged in, so we used 99.8% pure pool salt to produce replica seawater with a concentration of approximately 35 parts per million.
In the end, a predicted boat speed of 12 cm/s was calculated, which compared rather poorly with the average experimental speed of 1.4 cm/s. From this, we have identified a number of factors that may help to explain why a scaled-up model might not quite function as depicted in the film. One idea is that the theory and observation are mutually exclusive, meaning our theoretical model is likely too simplistic. Another major problem we encountered during experimentation is that the internal resistance of the batteries caused the current to rapidly drop during the test runs, and in order to have an adequate energy supply, a submarine with an MHD drive would have to have a generator – which defeats the purpose of making a large-scale silent propulsion system in the first place. Therefore, although an MHD drive would prove extremely useful in theory, more research is needed to understand exactly why it does not function as well as expected.
I decided to do this internship because I wanted to explore more about a topic that really intrigues me, and also to find out if physics is a field that I want to pursue later. I also wanted to gain some experience working in a formal lab setting and conducting research. By doing an internship, I knew I would also be able to network with the people there and get references that I might be able to use in the future.
Going into my internship, I was nervous, because although I enjoy the field of physics, it is not my go-to field when I think about my future career. However, as I continued working with Dr. Overduin and on the project, I became more and more intrigued. My major takeaway from this experience is that you should remain open-minded when going into an internship and not have any preconceived notions. If I had walked in telling myself that this is not what I want to do in life, then my experience would not have been as great as it was.
I would encourage a student who might not be sure if an internship is right for her to explore the options Bryn Mawr offers because students have a lot of say in what they want. Dr. Elton works hard to find an internship that each student will enjoy based on her interests. Also, the knowledge that you gain from the experience of having an internship is not solely academic. You learn a lot about yourself – or at least I did – in terms of what interests you and really what you might want to explore futher.
Located in Baltimore, Maryland, The Bryn Mawr School is a private all-girls pre-kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school with a coed preschool for ages 2 months through 5 years. Bryn Mawr provides students with exceptional educational opportunities on a beautiful 26-acre campus within the city limits. Inquisitive girls, excellent teaching, strong student-teacher relationships and a clear mission sustain our vibrant school community where girls always come first.