Encouraging girls to consider engineering earns student member a place on national team

Emily Smith
ASME NEWS

Andrea Wesser's first thoughts about a career as a Disney Imagineer occurred when she was an eighth grader. Her written request to Disney for information about how to follow up on her interest resulted in being mailed a copy of Imagineer magazine, which she read voraciously.

While studying the magazine to research how to become an Imagineer, Wesser kept coming across a word she didn't understand — engineering.

Her decade-long attempt to define that word was recognized nationally in February when Wesser was named to the USA Today All-Academic second team. The award, honoring her engineering accomplishments and her involvement in bringing engineering to the attention of grade-school-age girls and minorities, places the 22-year-old ASME member among the top 40 college students in the United States.

Andrea Wesser uses a skeleton to illustrate bioengineering concepts when talking to middle school and high school students.

"The lack of women and minorities is a severe disadvantage to industry," Wesser wrote in her nomination essay for the USA Today All-Academic team. "Consequently, it is necessary to promote and publicize the benefits of this career choice to young women and minorities and to help them overcome obstacles such as balancing life and career, time management, low self-esteem, sexual harassment and unfair grades/treatment in the classroom."

To promote the benefits of engineering as a career choice, Wesser participates in career fairs such as one that she helped organize last month for 450 elementary and middle school girls. "You have to reach them when they're young," Wesser said.

The goal of the presentations she gives at these fairs, and when talking to students while manning booths at science fairs, is to show girls that engineering is fun and to encourage them to pursue it as a career.

"Over the past three months," Wesser said, "I did outreach practically every weekend. I've probably spoken to over 3,000 students."

Her presentations feature creative cartoons and videos created by Wesser and her colleagues at the University of Central Florida's Office of Women in Engineering and Computer Science — a new office Wesser helped organize.

The office holds educational events, promotes internships, and offers tips on internships and study skills for women pursuing engineering at UCF. It also reaches out to high school girls.

The videos feature such memorable characters as "Britney Gears" and "Arithmetic Franklin." The latter appears in a Grammy Awards kind of setting. The former was created two years ago, before the debut of the recently released movie "Robots," which displays the name in a map to celebrity homes. The character in Wesser's video is a girl who is an engineering student during the day and a singer at night.

Wesser said she knew her message was getting through when a Britney Gears impersonator for whom she arranged an appearance at one of the career fairs was treated like a celebrity by the school-age girls in attendance.

ASME student member Andrea Wesser.

The videos have earned national recognition from the Society of Women Engineers, one of the many groups for which Wesser volunteers. They can be obtained free of charge by any group interested in showing them by e-mailing swe@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu.

"The videos show that we're fun," Wesser said. "We like to give [engineers] a contemporary edge."

Wesser, who received her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in December, has remained at UCF to pursue a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering with an emphasis on microtechnology.

She hopes to start her own business in microtechnology and, later, to use engineering to help with the excavation of archaeological sites.

As part of her senior team project last year, the ASME member helped design a wheelchair for young victims of land mines in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Vietnam. The group originally sought to design a wheelchair that would work well on beaches, but decided to make it more affordable so that it could be used in Third World countries.

Wesser and her colleagues are pursuing a patent for part of their design, which allows children to drive and steer the wheelchair with their hands.

Now a graduate student in mechanical engineering at UCF, Wesser will begin a two-year, National Science Foundation-funded project this fall to develop skin sensors that could warn allergy sufferers when they are close to an irritant, one of many skin-sensor applications.

Ranganathan Kumar, an ASME member who is chairman of the UCF Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering department, said he's proud of Wesser's accomplishments and that she is a great role model for young women who want to study engineering.

"She is very outgoing and is always eager and willing to learn," Kumar said. "She is not afraid to talk to somebody and ask them what they think, and she also comes up with a lot of very original ideas."

 

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