I Can: Girls in Engineering

When it comes to National Engineers Week, gender doesn’t matter. Mississippi Power hosted a camp today called, “I Can: Girls in Engineering”. This interactive camp allows these ninth grade girls from Northeast High School to learn from females in the male-dominated field of engineering.

“So it’s really nice to get these girls at such a young age so they’re starting to think, ‘oh ok, so STEM, like math and science, I really like that and I’m really good at it. What can I do with it?” -Miranda Lee, Division Engineer, Mississippi Power

“We made electricity switches, but not with real electricity. We used different things to see how we can turn fans on and off and make doorbells go on and off. I have learned that with electricity, if you don’t put circuits where they need to be then your outcome won’t be right and it wouldn’t work.” -Shantiona Bridges, 9th grade student

One of the fun things that the girls have done today is they actually made bath salts. In order to do that, they pour Epson salt in the bowl, they pick a fragrance, and then say, they got some blue coloring there. They then pour all this in there, mix it up with a spoon, and then they have blue bath salts. They can use this in the bath tub to soak for muscle aches or anything like that. So, this is just a really cool event for these girls to get hands- on experience in what it can be like in the engineering world.

“A lot of girls aren’t thinking about what job they can have, instead they’re more thinking of oh I like this math class or this physics class. So getting them to put two and two together of this is an option for me and not just guys can do it. I can do it, and I can be really good at it.” -Lee, MS Power