Event for girls at college
More than 400 girls are gearing up for the 15th annual Eighth-grade Girls' Math-Science Conference planned for Jan. 13 by the Marysville-Yuba City Branch of the American Association of University Women.
The conference is a series of workshops and speakers featuring women in various professions. It will begin with a welcome speech at 9 a.m. at the Yuba College Theater in Linda.
“What we're trying to do is show the girls, in the first-person, what a woman who uses math and science in her career does,” said Sheila Eden, schools contact chairwoman for the conference and a 15-year member of the AAUW. “They see what the job entails, what are the benefits of the job ... we're aiming for the girls to say, ‘Well, maybe I could do it.'”
The girls go to three different workshops headed by various professional women, including a veterinarian, a criminalist, an emergency medical technician and a dermatologist.
Eden said the enrollment of eighth-grade girls this year exceeded previous years - 420 compared to 260 last year. Part of the increase may have been due to the newest school in Plumas Lake, Rio Del Oro. Eden said 39 girls came from that school.
“They do not have to qualify or anything like that,” Eden said. “Most of the teachers, if they can manage it, work it like a field trip.”
The conference's keynote speaker will be Chi Du, a local family doctor who specializes in preventative care and women's heart disease. At the end of the conference around noon, the girls may participate in an optional tour of the campus to make it “a little less frightening and less overwhelming for them,” Eden said.
Participants are not graded or tested after the workshops, and they don't have to have certain grades to take part, Eden said.
“For so many years, women have not been equally represented in careers that have math or science in them, so we're just trying to jack that up a little bit,” she said.
Appeal-Democrat reporter Kymm Mann can be reached at 749-4708. You may e-mail her at kmann@appealdemocrat.com.
