CURIE Academy encourages high school girls to pursue engineering

Holly Bender, left, of Syoset, N.Y., takes part in the CURIE Academy's mock public meeting in the MacDonald Moot Court Room of Myron Taylor Hall July 11. Matthew Fondeur/University Photography

By Bill Steele

The Curie River and its tributaries carry a heavy load. There are several manufacturing facilities that draw water from the rivers and discharge wastes into them; three municipalities dump in sewage with varying amounts of treatment. Downstream a ways, there are commercial fish farms and greenhouses. The water quality in the rivers is OK but not great. It isn't suitable for drinking or swimming, and the levels of ammonia and dissolved oxygen don't meet state limits. Last year the fish farms suffered a couple of kills that might have been caused by excess ammonia. Now one of the local manufacturers, Marie Products, wants to build a new and larger plant. It could mean more jobs and also more water pollution.

You're an environmental engineer asked to do a water quality analysis and come up with recommendations, not just about the new plant but about overall water management for the region. A challenging problem for a professional engineer but apparently not too much for a group of 40 high school girls who spent the week of July 9-15 on the Cornell campus in a program called CURIE Academy, designed to encourage young women to go into engineering.

Designing a water management plan for the fictitious Curie River Basin was just one of many activities the program offered. The students also attended presentations by several College of Engineering faculty members explaining the various fields of engineering, and they heard from a panel of women engineers. By living in a dormitory, eating in a campus dining hall and touring the campus, they also received a brief introduction to college life.

The water management project continued throughout the week, woven in between the other activities. Unlike the projects created for CURIE students in previous years, this one involves much more than solving a standard technical problem, according to Daisy Fan, a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering who designed the project. "We want them to learn that the first step in solving the problem is to define just what the problem is," she explained.

The kickoff was a mock public meeting in which the MacDonald Moot Court Room of Myron Taylor Hall became the city council chamber of the fictitious town of Hodgkin. (Most of the names in the project are those of important women scientists or engineers; Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Marie Curie, of course, was the co-discoverer of radium. CURIE, however, officially stands for Cornell University Research in Engineering.) Ithaca Mayor Alan Cohen portrayed the mayor of Hodgkin in the exercise; Deb Grantham, an extension associate in Soil, Crop and Atmospheric Sciences, was a representative of Marie Products; Owen Bailey, graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, was an environmental activist; and Daisy Fan was a representative of the Curie River Authority. The high school students, as members of the audience, had to gather information they would need by asking questions of the panel.

Later, the students learned how to test water quality in the lab and used water quality modeling software to make projections about the future state of the river water under various conditions. How they used that information was up to them. They could look for the lowest-cost solution or the solution that produced the best water quality; they could impose restrictions on the new plant or ask municipalities to improve their wastewater treatment; or anything in between. In their final presentations, Fan said, "They were really able to put together the economic and social issues. They looked not just at the costs of wastewater treatment but at the ethical questions involved in engineering decision-making."

The CURIE program, now in its fifth year, draws young women from high schools all over the United States. This year 155 applied for 40 openings. What they all have in common is an intense interest in math and science and high academic standing, with GPAs ranging from 3.7 to 4.6. Some come from specialized schools like Bronx High School of Science or the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a few from private prep schools and many from public high schools.

Four of the current group already have had research experience, four have won awards in math and science fairs and competitions, and six have attended at least one math or science camp or special program outside of high school. One already has a start-up web-design company working with businesses, in partnership with other students she met at one of those science camps (or as she called it, "nerd-genius camp").

But they haven't all decided yet to become engineers. If you question any of them about the CURIE experience, the statement you get most often is, "I'm glad I came. Before this I didn't really know what engineering was."

A show of hands at the end of the week found about half the girls indicating that they'd like to go into engineering, with a much smaller number knowing what branch they'd like to pursue, according to R.J. Burt, assistant director of Women's Programs in Engineering, an office of the College of Engineering, and acting coordinator of the CURIE Academy.

There are no clear numbers on how many of the CURIE girls decide to attend Cornell, but that doesn't matter, said Krishna S. Athreya, director of Women's Programs in Engineering. The CURIE program is sponsored by that office and the Office of Engineering Minority Programs. "The goal is to interest them in engineering, wherever they may go to college," Athreya said.