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Smith Receives Grant From GE to Support Engineering StudiesSmith College recently received a grant of $74,730 from the GE Fund to support the establishment of an engineering program for women. The GE Fund grant will finance stipends for summer research internships for Smith students, a speaker series, engineering conferences, faculty and peer mentoring and the development of engineering design courses. The initial series of activities will be "pivotal in helping to lay the foundation of an engineering program at Smith and to encourage women and underrepresented minorities to pursue careers in engineering," observes Doreen Weinberger, associate professor of physics at Smith, who, with Ruth Haas, associate professor of mathematics, is co-director of the project. "This opportunity comes at a particularly auspicious time since the college is in the latter stages of a comprehensive, college-wide self study that seeks to create new initiatives that will build on our existing strengths while also addressing issues of national concern," commented Susan C. Bourque, Smith's dean for academic development. The proposal to create an engineering program meets both criteria, Bourque points out: it addresses immediate national concerns about women's access to engineering careers and the global competitiveness of the U.S.; and it grows out of the significant success that Smith has already achieved in educating women to pursue scientific careers. Indeed, the college ranks among the top undergraduate institutions in the country for its production of women science majors who go on to professional careers in scientific fields. Undergraduates involved in the project, which is being called the GE-Smith Undergraduate Research Program for Women in Engineering, will have opportunities to work closely on summer research projects with Smith science faculty who have engineering expertise and with engineering faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The college has received two previous $75,000 grants from the GE Fund-one in 1994 to establish an undergraduate research program in the sciences for underrepresented women of color and an earlier one, in 1991, specifically directed at encouraging women in chemistry, computer science and physics to pursue academic careers in the sciences and help counter the scarcity of women and minority faculty members on the nation's campuses. Additional funding for the engineering program will include financial support from the college itself and from an earlier Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant. |
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