Recruitment in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Design, Implementation, and Projects in the Women in

Applied Science and Engineering (WISE) Programs

Arizona State University

Mary R. Anderson-Rowland, Shawna Fletcher, Mary White

ABSTRACT

Ensuring a diverse engineering workforce has never been more important than

now as technology impacts every aspect of both global businesses and our

personal lives. At the same time general interest in engineering is at a

twenty year low. Our ability to attract female students into technical

fields begins very early with collaboration of their teachers, counselors,

parents, business partners, university faculty, and community. Since

engineering is not a part of a normal junior high or high school curriculum,

special creative efforts need to be made to motivate potential female

students about the multiple career options they have in technical fields.

Students very early on need to see the relationships between the things that

interest them and how an engineering career is a vehicle to impact and to

improve the future of that interest.

The Office of Student Affairs for the College of Engineering and Applied

Sciences (CEAS) at Arizona State University (ASU) has a three pronged

collaborative, sustained program for the recruitment and retention of female

engineering students that addresses these concerns. The Office of Student

Affairs in the CEAS provides year round programming that gives a continuum

of support for female students from middle school to the university level.

Under the umbrella of the Office of Student Affairs exists the Office of

Minority Engineering Programs, which includes the Minority Engineering

Program and the Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Achievement Program,

the Women in Applied Science and Engineering Program, and the Recruitment

Office. The uniqueness of these three departments is that they collaborate

in sharing resources to ensure that parents, K-12 teachers and counselors,

and their female students are informed and engaged in the pathway of

programs that will provide services up to a ten-year period from middle

school to college graduation.

Particularly, the Women in Applied Science and Engineering (WISE) Program

provides summer recruiting programs that serve to bridge elementary,

secondary, and college level education for girls and women. In addition to

introducing female students to career options, these programs spark

individual interest and allow these students to preview types of courses

associated with engineering academics. Attrition studies have reported that

women often enter into science, mathematics, and engineering with little

information on their discipline and consequently decide to transfer to other

majors or forgo receiving their education altogether. Therefore, it is

necessary that recruitment programs create curricula that introduce the

student to basic engineering concepts and directly expose them to the

expectations of the college level curriculum.

This paper will

* address the WISE Program's curriculum and projects,

* provide an overview of WISE summer program projects geared toward

increasing the number of girls entering engineering fields,

* provide program evaluations from middle school and high school

female participants,

* and also provide a comprehensive PATHWAY diagram that reflects the

early, three-pronged outreach efforts that have lead to ASU's CEAS success

in increasing engineering enrollments and especially increasing them in the

areas of women and minority students.