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Michael Padilla, 277-1816

January 7, 2002

Los Alamos native Welch promotes engineering to young women

University of New Mexico mechanical engineering student Katie Welch always knew that she would become an engineer and now she wants to help young women become interested in the field.

A native of Los Alamos, Welch, daughter of Rebecca Welch, says it’s important to promote engineering to young women.
“We are a minority,” she says. “Women need to know that engineering is not just for men. It’s for women, too.”

She believes the main problem is that engineers are often looked down upon.

“The engineering field is not promoted like doctors, lawyers, and business men are,” Welch says. “They get the glamour and we get called nerds. The average salary for a lawyer is equivalent to that of an engineer. Most people don’t know that. I think that engineering needs to be promoted in a more glamorous way to attract more women, and it needs to be known that engineers are the brains behind most of the things people use in their daily lives.”

To help with this stigmatism, Welch helps promote engineering to young women in several ways.

As president of the UNM Society of Women Engineers (SWE), she served as the main coordinator for “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” this past year. All engineering staff and students were invited to bring their daughters to UNM to learn about some of the fun things engineers do. The participants were treated to a laser light show. They participated in a tour of two different robotics labs and they also toured a soils lab where the girls got to play with soil.

Another event that SWE and Welch are involved in is “Introduce a Girl to Engineering,” aimed at middle school aged girls. Last year was its first year and plans are underway to do it again this semester.

“We brought them in for a full day and had varied labs for them to conduct and team building projects for them,” she said, adding that one event was a tower building contest and another was creating goggle, which is corn starch, food coloring and water. The girls conducted a centrifugal experiment, where they sat in chairs and made themselves turn by bringing their arms in and out. In addition all the girls designed a rocket and then used Alcester and water to launch them.

One endeavour which she is really proud of is serving as a teacher’s assistant for Engineering 116, an introductory course for incoming female engineers. For the course’s main project students made a video sponsored by Ford designed to promote engineering to all young students, especially women.

“We wanted to show young children that engineers do and build fun things. The theme of the video is amusement parks, with mostly women workers and women bosses,” she said. “However, we didn’t want to discriminate against men, so there are clips and images of men throughout the video as well.

The plan is to send the video to schools in hopes that it will be shown to students.

In addition to serving as the president for SWE, Welch was the treasurer for the Engineering Student Council. Last year she was a mentor for the Women Engineering Student Peer Mentoring Program, which has combined with the Women in Science and Engineering program. She also works as an undergraduate student in the Solar Thermal Technology group at Sandia National Laboratories.

When she is not doing homework, working at Sandia or participating with her school groups, she enjoys mountain biking in the foot hills of Albuquerque. She plans to pursue a masters degree in mechanical engineering, and possibly get her MBA.

Her advice to young women is to take as many math classes as possible prior to entering college. “It’s hard, but it’s worth it,” she says.

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