Expanding Your Horizons
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Expanding Your Horizons It's 6 a.m. on a Saturday in early March. A colleague and I drive a pickup around campus in the drizzle and dark, putting up signs. I've barely had my coffee and I'm wrestling sawhorses and signposts, staplers and duct tape, trying to turn an urban campus into an oasis for a thousand young women for the day. 7 a.m. The conference begins in two hours. Parents arrive with their daughters, asking anxious questions: Where can I park? Will my daughter be safe on campus? Are there any vegetarian lunches? Is there anyplace to get coffee? The buses from Monterey County arrive; the drivers want to know if they can bring their own daughters next year. A stream of women scientists and engineers enter the buildings, toting microscopes and liquid nitrogen dewars, computers, boxes of equipment and supplies, jars of sheep eyeballs. An airline pilot arrives in her uniform. More volunteers arrive to staff the lunch table, the snack table, the information table. 8 a.m. The signs are up, the parents are gone, business is brisk at the information table, the sun is shining, and hundreds of 12- to 16-year-old women sit in the auditorium, eagerly awaiting the start of the Expanding Your Horizons Conference at San Jose State University. 9 a.m. The 13th annual Expanding Your Horizons Conference begins. After an introduction by a university vice president, a marine biologist from Monterey Bay Aquarium begins her keynote speech, "Sisters, Sons and Seaweed: Celebrating a Life in Science." The audience of junior high and high school women giggle over the sea otters frisking across the screen and shriek at the dissected jelly fish. The speaker talks about her family and her education, and how much fun her job is. Thirty minutes later, the girls stream out of the auditorium and on to their first workshop. I follow a few to the "Money, Metals and Microchips" workshop, put on by women graduate students from Stanford University's Materials Science and Engineering Department. During the one-hour workshop the kids measure the voltage developed across an orange, explore the ductile-brittle transition of balloons, look through a metallographic microscope at work-hardened paper clips, and build crystal models of styrofoam. Other girls attend workshops entitled "All Aboard for Mars," "Creative
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Contraptions," "The Magic of Magnetism," "How to Play with DNA," "Physics of Toys," "Incredible Edible Science," and "Rockin' the Bay in the Geo-Logic Way." All of these workshops are led by women scientists, engineers, and students from various universities, laboratories, and corporations around the Bay Area. Each of the 1,000 junior high and high school women at the all-day conference attended three hands-on workshops on science, math, or engineering. Sixty-five different workshops were offered on topics ranging from veterinary science and computer programming to microbiology. Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) is a nationwide program, held at more than 200 separate sites in 32 states. In the Bay Area alone there are four different confere
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