CETA Announces the GETSET! Summer Program

The fields of engineering, technology, and architecture offer rewarding careers that can make a huge difference in people’s lives. Yes, it’s true, engineers, technologists, and architects build bridges and homes and rocket ships and cars—but people, especially women, should know that it’s also engineers and technologies who work with healthcare professionals to create the prostheses that help people who have lost limbs regain their mobility and independence. It’s architects who create spaces where people with limited mobility can lead more independent lives. Engineers help develop new fabrics, new digital technologies, and new habitats for living in space and under water and in cities and give us new ways to reuse, recycle, and reduce, too.

Different people bring new ideas and create new things and so help to make the world better for everyone, so it is crucial that the engineering, technology, and architecture workforce becomes more diverse. . Right now, that workforce is an area where the percentage of women remains low compared to their presence in other fields such as the biological sciences, medicine, and law. In the latter fields, women are half of the students and practitioners. In engineering, only 18 percent of degrees granted in 2008 to all engineering graduates went to women.

We hope that by showing young women what people in these fields actually do, they will be inspired to study one of them. Certainly, we in CETA would be delighted if they were to choose to study with us, but one of our goals is simply to bring women into our disciplines to help solve problems for people.

Therefore, CETA, in collaboration with the University High School of Science and Engineering, is starting a summer program called GETSET!, Girls Exploring Technology, Science and Engineering for Tomorrow. In this two-week, program, rising ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-grade women will be introduced to engineering, technology, and architecture as helping professions. The young women will experience hands-on introductions to the engineering, technology, and architecture disciplines taught in CETA delivered by CETA professors. They will also interact with women who work in those disciplines as well as with female CETA students who will serve as their mentors and be available to them to answer questions about college preparation and the like.

This program is supported by grants from the Women’s Education and Leadership Fund (WELFund), a legacy of the Hartford College for Women, and other funders.

More information about the program can be found at uhaweb.hartford.edu/ceta/getset.