Summer Opportunities Lure Students Toward Tech Careers

Many efforts to encourage young Americans to pursue careers in science, engineering and manufacturing took advantage of students having the summer off from regular classes. Programs range from one-week science camps to season-long internships and cooperative workstudies. To help other communities begin planning for the end of the 2003 school year, SSTI highlights a few examples from this past summer in this article.

The Manufacturing Pathway Initiative, an education and training program based in western Pennsylvania, prepares students to enter careers or to pursue post-secondary education in the manufacturing industry directly upon graduation from high school. Open to a broad student audience, the initiative is a partnership of employers, high schools, vocational-technical schools, post secondary institutions, community programs, parents and students that focuses on demanding industry-based classroom work supplemented by worksite learning through internships with local manufacturers.

This summer, 80 students from 47 high schools in six southwestern Pennsylvania counties served internships at 41 companies throughout the region, as part of the initiative. The program is structured such that students enter a four-week hands-on paid internship following a two-week period of classroom training. Students are involved in many facets of the company in which they are employed and are expected to gain a thorough understanding of the company's internal and external operations.

The University of Maryland's incubator program enables students to intern with a company to pursue careers in S&T fields. The nonprofit Technology Advancement Program (TAP), which presently houses nine young companies, has graduated 43 surviving companies since being established in 1985. Coupled with its business school, TAP gives Maryland MBA candidates the opportunity to work as intern consultants. An intern's salary is roughly $20 an hour, half of which is paid for by the incubator companies. In return, the companies gain an employee with business experience for less than the cost of hiring a full-time MBA graduate.

Similar initiatives exist elsewhere around the country. At the University of Colorado, area high school students are given the chance to participate in the engineering college's Success Institute, a program for boosting interest in engineering. The 5-year-old program draws students to CU throughout their high school years. As a benefit to CU, students often will follow up their week-long participation in the institute, enrolling at the college after graduation.

While programs like CU's Success Institute and the Manufacturing Pathway Initiative are open to all types of students, other programs may focus on females or minorities and target younger audiences. A summer camp called "Girls and Graphics" held at the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith, for example, is designed for seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade girls. In it, girls can further their interest in such fields as architectural technology and mechanical engineering by exploring the equipment and computer software used in the fields.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the one-week long residential program GAMES (Girls' Adventures in Math, Engineering, and Science) is designed to give academically talented young women in grades 6-8 an opportunity to explore math, engineering, and science through demonstrations, classroom presentations, hands-on activities, and contacts with other women in these technical fields. Because interest in the four-year-old program has grown so quickly, this past summer the university offered separate structures and computer sciences camps, which accommodated a combined 86 girls.