BARBARA HUGHEY: OK.
So as Kristen said, I'm Barbara Hughey.
I teach in the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT.
And I thought you might want to just see a little bit about me.
So I was more or less from New Jersey.
I was born in Philadelphia, lived in New Jersey and outside
of Philadelphia.
There we go.
I moved back and forth about every two and a half years.
Briefly moved to Southern California when I moved.
And in fact I was an undergraduate at Princeton
where I went in as a physics major.
I had always loved math and physics.
I ended up coming out with an engineering physics
degree in the mechanical and aerospace
engineering department, which was awesome for what I'm
doing now, and also for a lot of the research
I did before I came back to MIT.
And then I came up to Boston to get my PhD in physics at MIT.
Very highly esoteric subject that
was great fun involving quantum mechanics,
but not terribly useful.
And then I worked for a couple small companies
in the area mostly doing applications of particle
accelerators to medicine.
And actually a lot of it-- I know
you're spending the day on sort of imaging and image
processing-- I did a lot with positron emission Tomography
images, magnetic MRI images, things like that.
And then in 2002 I came back to MIT
to teach the undergraduate measurement and instrumentation
class, where I basically teach students how to do experiments.
And we have a project we call Go Forth and Measure,
where each student picks their own project and does something.
Actually, Kristen, what was your Go Forth and Measure?
What was your go forth and measure project?
KRISTEN: Me?
BARBARA HUGHEY: You.
KRISTEN: Oh.
So does anyone like to run here?
Track?
Awesome.
Me too.
I took a pressure sensor and put it inside a sneaker,
and I tried running on different surfaces
and compared the impact of running
on a treadmill versus running on concrete.
BARBARA HUGHEY: And we have a lot of really cool projects
like that where people do everyday things that they're
interested in, including food, things like that.
So anyways, back to the women's technology program.
So I came to MIT in 2002.
In 2006 I was asked to expand the existing women's technology
program which was founded in 2002 in electrical engineering
and computer science.
So most of what you're doing today would fit more in that.
And then we expanded it to mechanical engineering.
And the goal is to spark high school girl's interest
in studying engineering and computer science, which
is I think exactly the goal of this program, too.
So our approach is to pick girls to pick students
who are rising high school seniors who
are really good and really interested in math and science,
but don't really have a background in engineering.
Have maybe heard of engineering, people maybe
tell them you should think about engineering,
but they don't really know what it is.
They haven't taken a lot of engineering classes.
They're just curious and not sure
what they want to major in.
So we give them a four week exposure to engineering.
There are two curriculum tracks, electrical engineering
and computer science, and then the one that I run,
which is mechanical engineering.
I don't have a lot of time so I can't go into too much detail,
but I'll be happy to answer questions
about what we do in them.
They're mostly hands on classes, like what you're doing today.
We of course-- especially mechanical engineering--
have to teach them a lot of physics,
because you can't do much in mechanical engineering
until you have physics.
But physics is fun.
It really is.
And then try to correct ideas about what engineers are like
and what they do.
And the students give us wonderful quotes,
such as that they realize engineering
has so much more depth and so many more applications.
Coming in they have some of the preconceptions that you might
have, which is that engineers work alone,
it's not very exciting, not very people oriented.
But in fact it is.
You work a lot in teams, as I think you're doing today.
And you get to do a whole range of applications
and make products that are helpful to people.
We also want to increase confidence of the students
by exposing them to female engineers of all ages.
Give them an opportunity to live away
from home-- so it's four weeks living away from home.
The students live in the MIT dorms.
They live with MIT undergrads are recent graduates who
help them with their homework, and also do
social outings and everything.
And the classes are taught by graduate students
in mechanical engineering or EECS.
And-- I already said some of this-- so again,
it's a hands on.
There's 40 students in the EECS track
and 20 students in the mechanical engineering track,
so there's 60 students total.
We have hands on lab classes with projects
in mechanical engineering.
We like to have a sort of capstone project
at the end of each week, which ranges from building
cranes that can sustain a certain amount of weight,
through doing oral presentations,
making a poster presentation.
And then there are two special final week presentations
where the EECS students build DC motors,
and the WTP-ME students build Rube Goldberg machines,
which are basically just chain reaction machines.
But the thing we do to make it possibly
a little more interesting is they have to figure out
what's going on in every step.
So it's not just trial and error,
they have to apply the design principles we've taught them.
They have to use the physics and the science
we've taught them to figure out what's going on,
and then make their machine run.
And we also do a lot of faculty and industry guest speakers
and tours.
We also have, as I said, MIT students and recent graduates
are the instructors and also the tutors
that live with the students.
And these are some photos from the motor
building for the EECS.
So this is actually the professor who runs it.
They figure out the design of their motor,
then they do all the machining.
They build them in pairs.
So that's one of the completed motors.
And they use actually the mechanical engineering shop
to do all this.
And then here's some photographs from ME
the track where you see a Rube Goldberg machine.
Dominoes are of course often used.
Various types of trip wires and things.
Usually pendulums and Slinkys used.
And then there's a final step.
They can decide.
This one for their final step, they
pulled aside a curtain that then showed a photograph
of all the students and staff.
So since 2002-- reminder again, ME started in 2006,
but EECS started in 2002.
Up through last summer we've had 744 females finish the program.
They all have a-- they say WTP has a big impact on them.
Many of them-- as I'll share on the next slide-- many of them
go into engineering.
Some of them after going through WTP
decide that they actually don't like engineering.
It's not for them.
That's a perfectly great outcome for us
as well, because then they have learned and saved
their parents money of sending them to an engineering school.
They've learned, oh I don't really like engineering.
I want to do something else.
So either outcome is fine.
We just want to expose them and give them
a real more realistic view of what engineering actually is.
Many of them would not have thought of an engineering major
or applying to MIT.
And as you see, actually many of them
end up majoring in either engineering or computer
science.
More than 60% of the alumni have majored
or are majoring in engineering or computer science.
Many others in science, math, there's
a big bunch in business, and then a few of others.
So it's highly successful for its goal, which really
is to get girls interested in majoring in engineering,
or at the very least to let them know what engineering is about.
And this is, I think, the class of 2014, probably.
And that's our website.
And so if you have any questions--
no-- acknowledgements first.
I couldn't do this alone.
There's a woman who runs the EECS
program and the whole program.
The ME program is funded by an amazing woman who
is in her-- actually I think she just
turned 80, who is a mechanical engineer.
And she funds our program.
And then various other people.
So, any questions?
Nothing.
OK.
OK, and if you are not-- I know there are some juniors here,
which unfortunately have missed the deadline for this summer.
But if you are not a junior, if you're an eighth, ninth,
or 10th grader, look in around November
of your junior year on that website right there
and look for application information.
And the applications are usually due at the beginning
of January.
OK?
OK.
[APPLAUSE]