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Curiosity Takes Root
The fifth-annual Maryland STEM Career Fair for Girls at Bryn Mawr provides inspiration and opportunity to girls exploring the possibilities that await them.
It’s just past 11 a.m. on Saturday, October 14, and the Katherine Van Bibber Gymnasium on Bryn Mawr’s campus is a hive of activity. In one corner, aisles of posters display the scientific research conducted by dozens of Bryn Mawr girls. Many of the students stand next to their posters, ready to explain their research to passersby. On the other side of the room, representatives from a variety of STEM businesses and organizations are busy educating teenagers about the myriad career options available to them in the future.
This is Bryn Mawr's fifth-annual Maryland STEM Career Fair for Girls, an exciting event aimed at encouraging more girls to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics – the STEM fields. A core component of the fair is that the representatives of the various companies in attendance are women. The idea is that it is not only important to give girls information about STEM careers, but also role models who can tell them what it’s like to be a woman working in a STEM career.
The first fair took place at Bryn Mawr in February 2014. Since then, the event has more than doubled in size to include over 30 organizations and girls from 23 area schools. MaryKat Weigman, a sophomore at Bryn Mawr, has come to the fair for the past four years, and says that each year she finds something different. “As your brain develops and you learn new stuff and take new science classes, there are new things that you find interesting,” she says.
Raven Brown, a Bryn Mawr senior, initially came to the fair this year to present a poster covering the research she did over the summer as part of a STEM internship. As a first-time attendee, she was impressed by the range of options. “I thought it was going to be mostly biology and medical organizations, but there are all sorts of organizations here – wildlife conservation, architecture, construction,” Brown says. “The representative from Stanley Black & Decker was showing me how they made a 3D printed vacuum – that was really cool.”
The highlight of her experience, though, was talking with the representative from Google – Diana Salsbury, a Bryn Mawr alumna from the Class of 2011. “I talked to her for 25 minutes,” Brown says. “It was really great to connect and know that we share this history together.”
This is Bryn Mawr's fifth-annual Maryland STEM Career Fair for Girls, an exciting event aimed at encouraging more girls to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics – the STEM fields. A core component of the fair is that the representatives of the various companies in attendance are women. The idea is that it is not only important to give girls information about STEM careers, but also role models who can tell them what it’s like to be a woman working in a STEM career.
The first fair took place at Bryn Mawr in February 2014. Since then, the event has more than doubled in size to include over 30 organizations and girls from 23 area schools. MaryKat Weigman, a sophomore at Bryn Mawr, has come to the fair for the past four years, and says that each year she finds something different. “As your brain develops and you learn new stuff and take new science classes, there are new things that you find interesting,” she says.
Raven Brown, a Bryn Mawr senior, initially came to the fair this year to present a poster covering the research she did over the summer as part of a STEM internship. As a first-time attendee, she was impressed by the range of options. “I thought it was going to be mostly biology and medical organizations, but there are all sorts of organizations here – wildlife conservation, architecture, construction,” Brown says. “The representative from Stanley Black & Decker was showing me how they made a 3D printed vacuum – that was really cool.”
The highlight of her experience, though, was talking with the representative from Google – Diana Salsbury, a Bryn Mawr alumna from the Class of 2011. “I talked to her for 25 minutes,” Brown says. “It was really great to connect and know that we share this history together.”
Banner: MaryKat Weigman '20 examines a plasticized human brain at one of the fair booths.
Above: A Bryn Mawr student presents the poster explaining the research that she took part in over the summer.
Below, left: A student from Bryn Mawr and her friend from Towson High School speak with one of the presenters.
Middle: A presenter works with a young fair attendee on an activity. One of the main goals of the fair is to provide women role models for girls interested in STEM careers.
Right: Two attendees from Bryn Mawr explore a virtual reality program used by an architecture firm presenting at the fair.
Above: A Bryn Mawr student presents the poster explaining the research that she took part in over the summer.
Below, left: A student from Bryn Mawr and her friend from Towson High School speak with one of the presenters.
Middle: A presenter works with a young fair attendee on an activity. One of the main goals of the fair is to provide women role models for girls interested in STEM careers.
Right: Two attendees from Bryn Mawr explore a virtual reality program used by an architecture firm presenting at the fair.
For her part, Salsbury is delighted to have the opportunity to come back to campus and help educate girls about her career – the roots of which she can trace back to Bryn Mawr. “Both of my parents were lawyers, and I had no computer science background whatsoever, but I decided to take AP Computer Science during my senior year at Bryn Mawr,” Salsbury explains. “I fell in love with it, and ended up studying it in college.”
One of Salsbury’s objectives at the fair is to help girls get a better understanding of what it means to be a software engineer. “A lot of times, the image that comes into your head is one from pop culture, which is typically a dude, typically drinking Red Bull in a dark room who doesn’t get out very much and is just furiously typing,” Salsbury says with a laugh. “But there are so many different ways to run with it.”
This was something that Salsbury discovered as a senior at Bryn Mawr, when she interned at Firaxis Games, a local video game company, during her senior project. “What was so eye-opening to me was that most of them are artists and they spend a lot of their time drawing,” she says. “I couldn’t understand how they could be scientists but also spend their time drawing all day until I watched them draw a sketch and then animate it, which is just physics. I thought, wow, there are all these different ways that you can take this skill – because it’s a life skill as much as it’s a career – and apply it anywhere.”
As a woman working in a STEM field, Salsbury is still very much in the minority. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, less than one percent of girls arrive at college with the intention of majoring in computer science. In engineering, women earn just 18 percent of undergraduate, 22 percent of master’s and 23 percent of doctoral degrees. Research shows that graduates of girls' schools are three times more likely to choose a career in a field like engineering than those that attended coed schools, but the gap is still immense. Hopefully, events like the STEM Career Fair will help to change this. As MaryKat Weigman notes, it makes a difference to meet women who are working in the careers that she is interested in pursuing one day. “You get the same information from men or women, but when it’s a woman, it’s easier to connect with them and understand where they’re coming from. It’s more inspirational.”
Susan Converse, a longtime employee of Lockheed Martin, feels the same way. As a woman who began working in STEM long before events like this were available, she’s glad to be able to serve as the type of role model she wishes she’d had. “It’s so important to see that there are all of these different kinds of opportunities, and to see that there are women who are there, who have done it and are working in science and math,” she says. “It encourages them to do it – to just go for it.”
Above: Diana Salsbury '11, a software engineer for Google, shows off the company's virtual reality headset while explaining what she does for Google.
Keynote Speaker: Jeanne Marie Martin
This year, the fair featured keynote speaker Jeanne Marie Martin, the President/CEO of JMar Enterprises, LLC, a company she founded to address the growing gap for women in STEM-related fields. JMar provides an opportunity for business and education to come together, through diversity and STEM-related consulting services, to develop their future employees. With 30 years in technology, Martin has amassed a wealth of cross-functional experiences at the local, national and global levels, enabling the company to create sustainable relationships that empower young women to pursue STEM careers while also providing local businesses with a larger, better-skilled talent pool to address their workforce development and business requirements. These relationships both benefit young woman interested in STEM careers as well as increasing the number of women in STEM-related fields, filling a critical gap in the labor pool.
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.