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Illinois Tech joined the nationwide effort to encourage young women to succeed by sponsoring the Take Our Daughters to Work Day program. The MS. Foundation for women designed this National event to focus on girls' ideas, needs, and dreams-and to ensure that girls remain confident, strong and pursue a college education. The Women's Center arranged for the program to be held on April 26. It was a whole day of preplanned activities to introduce the girls to some of the many sciences and engineering fields. They arrived on campus at 9 am and proceeded to have breakfast, which was very generously sponsored by Sodexho, then introduced themselves before touring the campus. This was followed by a session of leadership-oriented games organized by Lori Develice. Some of the parents joined their children for lunch. They got meal tickets, which were provided by the Admissions office, so that they could get a meal from the HUB cafeteria. After lunch, they had a rather interesting insight into the workings of a computer. Dr. Matt Bauer from the Computer Science department put together a presentation with playing cards, explaining how a computer sort data. Since the turnout for this year's program was very large (40 girls), they had to be divided into 2 groups for the wind tunnel tour by Dr. David Williams. They then took part in a biology lab put together by Dr. Karyn Bischoff. They learned about various toxic substances, and did an experiment to check for cyanide in apple seeds. |
This was followed by an extremely exciting chemistry lab demonstration by Dr. Peter Johnson. He had them test for the inflammability of various gases that are used to make balloons float. They got to touch and play with dry ice, see what happened to flowers when immersed in liquid nitrogen and watched a thermite reaction make ballbearings the old fashioned way. 
The girls were especially excited that there was a raffle drawing and they had a chance to win some cool prizes. They received a certificate of participation and a souvenir from the Women's Center. When asked about what they thought was the coolest thing about the day, one of the girls said that she was happy that the boys had to go to school while the girls could go and visit their parent's workplaces. Some thought that the leadership games were cool, while others were very impressed with the information they, got on the campus tour. 
Many of them were very excited to go on the wind tunnel tour. Some were very excited to weigh out stuff for the biology experiment, and some were just very fascinated by the explosions in the chemistry demonstration. |
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