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Trying to solve the mystery of engineering

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Trouble brews in the chocolate factory. Cockroaches rim the edge of a vat. A muffled plea for help suggests that a worker is in dire straits. Profits ooze away.

Kasi Dickerson, 18, of Johnston, keeps track of the turmoil on her computer screen. There are raw goods to order, inventory to track, production lines to manipulate. She cannot hide success or failure. Multicolored lines projected on another large white screen reveal the profit-making, problem-solving prowess being displayed by Dickerson and 29 other high school girls from Iowa and across the Midwest who are attending a Women in Science and Engineering weekend at Iowa State University.

Nearing the end of a long day that included microbiology and physics classes and a demonstration in materials handling, these girls look a little fatigued. At the moment, they are playing a computer game, ChocoBiz, that was created by Professor John Jackman to test engineering students’ knack for quick thinking while they operate a chocolate factory.

This is supposed to be fun, too, but profits are at stake. Some of the girls are in a hurry. Those red and green and purple lines dart across the white screen; the lines leading the pack seem to scream, “I’m first to the finish, but I’ve just lost a ton of money.”

Devna Popejoy-Sheriff, an adviser in Iowa State’s department of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, watches the screen, too. “The girls who take their time seem to do better,” she says. Popejoy-Sheriff has played this game many times over the last five years. She has yet to break into the profit column.

Dickerson is taking her time. Profits rise. She is getting a handle on things. Then, a plea for help emanates from her computer.

“My profits dropped significantly when the worker fell in the tank,” Dickerson said later while waiting to attend a glass-blowing demonstration that would reveal a link between art and science and problem solving.

Popejoy-Sheriff points out that an industrial engineer might have anticipated the problem and built a safety cage around the tank. Though losing money in the game is no fun, the key to it all is problem solving. It is the ability to work through tough issues that suggests the future for these young people.

Dickerson and the other students attending the Iowa State program have their career goals already in mind. They are among the relatively small number of high school students, boys and girls, who want to be engineers.

In their late teens, they look forward to taking on the big problems of the day.

“I’ve known I wanted to be an engineer since seventh grade,” Dickerson said.

That is good news for those in the profession, who worry that not enough young people want to become engineers.

David Scott, executive director of the Iowa Engineering Society, said Iowa and the country face a crisis because the number of high school kids entering engineering schools has been stagnant.

Scott and others in the profession, including the deans of engineering colleges at Iowa State and the University of Iowa, use the phrase “silent storm” to describe a looming collision of problems – ranging from water quality to production of biofuels to greenhouse gases – and the lack of problem solvers to deal with them.

And for policy-makers hoping to cast engineering as an enticing career for women, the numbers are even more acute. Of the 4,600 students enrolled in Iowa State’s College of Engineering, 665, or 14.5 percent, are women. Women made up 20 percent of the University of Iowa’s 2006-2007 graduating class of engineers.

Role models and mentors, even an encouraging word, can be rare for high school girls interested in engineering.

The situation prompted Rachel Scott, director of the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women, and leaders of women in science and engineering programs at Iowa State and the University of Iowa to urge legislators recently to support programs that encourage women to pursue careers in engineering and other fields that place an emphasis on science and mathematics.

If for no other reason, we should encourage women to enter these fields because of the overall scarcity of workers in professions that place a high value on proficiency in math and science, said Karen Zunkel, director of Iowa State’s Program for Women In Science and Engineering.

Zunkel noted that for many female students there is not an obvious connection between high school coursework and college, where choices are made about majors and careers. For example, similar numbers of high school girls and boys take chemistry and higher-level math courses, yet at some point the girls decide not to carry that course work into their college majors.

Zunkel, Scott and others try to provide that connection. Project Lead the Way targets students starting in the elementary grades on in an effort to attract them to engineering. Many times, the focus is on parents, who sometimes aren’t aware that engineering is an option for their children, and a lucrative career choice. Average starting pay for graduates of the Iowa State industrial engineering program is $57,500, Popejoy-Sheriff said.

And engineering just might get a bad rap in terms of not living up to students’ expectations that the work they do will have a larger societal benefit.

Kasi Dickerson doesn’t harbor many misconceptions about her career path. Neither does Sarah Campbell, an Iowa State senior from Ankeny who will graduate in May knowing that she already has a job with an electrical engineering firm in Lexington, Ky.

Campbell, 22, was one of the Iowa State engineering students who helped guide Dickerson and other students through the ChocoBiz factory management primer.

Because of her math and science skills, Campbell was encouraged to become an engineer in high school, even though she thought she wanted to teach.

“In high school, I was involved in a camp for women in engineering, but it was very late for me to decide what I wanted to do,” Campbell said. “My parents said, ‘Do what makes you happy.'”

She noted that at no time did she feel thwarted in pursuit of her career because she was female.

And though it is unusual to talk to women who faced outright discrimination in their field, it is not unusual to come across ones who had to press hard for recognition.

Dickerson and Campbell do not have to look far for a stellar example of where ability and determination can land them.

Susan Olgrotte, 44, is an Iowa State mechanical engineering graduate. In 2000, she became the first female partner in the 113-year history of Brooks Borg Skiles Architecture Engineering LLP of Des Moines.

Olgrotte is engaging and driven. She says she probably owns more power tools than most women in the Des Moines area. You get the impression that if she ever were shunned by male cohorts, she could easily overcome the slight.

She points out that in high school, she was the only girl in her physics class. “That was just a prelude to what it was like in college,” she said.

A couple of college professors were less than supportive.

“I didn’t put a lot of stock in that,” she said. “I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and nobody’s going to talk me out of it.” And she never had a class with the other two women who were in the mechanical engineering department when she attended Iowa State.

On the other hand, when Brooks Borg Skiles advertised for an engineer in 1989, shortly after she had received her master of business administration degree from the University of Iowa, she landed the job with little problem.

Olgrotte found herself in rarefied air. She points out that only 5 percent of mechanical engineers in the country share her specialty of designing commercial structures. Because Des Moines was bustling with construction early in her career, she also could observe her male counterparts to see what types of assignments they were getting and thereby establish a benchmark for whether she was getting similar work from her employer.

“As a supervisor now, I have more appreciation for when my engineers come to me and say, ‘I would like to have more experience in this area,'” she said.

Olgrotte has prevailed in her field, yet she is one of just two female engineers at Brooks Borg Skiles. The company, with 27 employees, has five female architects.

She also is quick to point out that whether male or female, there is a shortage of engineers. Her company has had a position open for two years for an experienced structural engineer.

Holly Elbert, 29, is the other female engineer at Brooks Borg Skiles. She has been with the firm for six months. She was the only female engineer at her previous employer.

Elbert is very much involved with mentoring young people who might have an interest in engineering.

She teaches an eight- to 10-week course at Des Moines area high schools in which she guides students through a design project as part of the Architects Construction and Engineering (ACE) program. She also teaches a class in engineering for gifted and talented middle school students.

Olgrotte is proud of the work Elbert does in guiding young people, male and female, into the profession. She hopes at least some of those young people turn out to be women who are not afraid to pursue their dreams.

“I would like to see more women in engineering because it would make it seem less mysterious, and it’s not that mysterious,” she said.