By
Rebecca Missel
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Workshops to begin in October
Armed with a computer lab, workshops and members of the academic community, the UA is building a new Virtual Development Center aimed at bringing more women into engineering.
"One of our major concerns is the attrition rate among freshmen women in engineering," said Ray Umashankar, director of the Virtual Development Center. "We will recruit women engineering students to participate in the VDC projects and award them scholarships."
The workshops will begin in October, even though the center is not scheduled to open until the start of next semester. The first of these will bring together people from the university, industry and the community to learn about technology over the Web, Umashankar said.
For its first project, the center will use software developed by University of Arizona Electrical and Computer Engineering professor, Ralph Martinez. This program connects urban hospitals with advanced radiology equipment to rural hospitals that lack these resources.
"When students get involved in real world applications, they will be able to see beyond the frustrations of Physics 141 and Math 125 and hang in there," said Umashankar, who is also the Director of Minority Engineering Programs.
The center will be constructed from three rooms in the Systems and Industrial Engineering building, and funds for the remodeling project have come from both the college and university administration.
Hewlett-Packard gave $250,000 in computers and equipment to the center. Umashankar said he raised an additional $143,000 in donations from venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and corporations for student scholarships and the workshops.
"It is my belief that unless you find a way to free up time for students to participate, even the best programs will be useless," he said.
Anita Borg, the president of the Institute for Women and Technology, founded the new center in 1998. Beginning last year, Borg set up these centers, devoted to bringing more women into technology. Now the UA center has been established as one of the newest sites.
"The number of women in the college is not decreasing, but it's not increasing at the rate we'd like either," said Thomas Peterson, dean of the College of Engineering and Mines.
Peterson estimated the chemical engineering and material science engineering departments have the highest concentrations of women -approximately 40 to 50 percent.
According to the university fact book, about 18 percent of the students in the College of Engineering and Mines were female in the fall of 1999.
"The focus of the VDC is an Internet-based environment to get information out to women about what role technology plays in their lives," Peterson said. "The beauty of it is it's a network that can be accessed from anywhere in the world."
Peterson thought the UA college had been singled out because "we are very sensitive to what extra things one needs to do to encourage women in engineering."
Both female professors and students in engineering programs agreed that the women are not less educated but are lacking in role models.
"Usually, women in engineering are good students - the issues come from society's nerd image," said Kathleen Virga, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
"In any career, there needs to be diversity," she said. "The way women look at problems is different from how men look and many different points of view is best."
Cynthia Hammond, a third-year graduate student in electrical and computer engineering said she chose the field by accident because she had always enjoyed math and physics.
"I didn't know what engineering was until college," she said. "It's thinking for a living instead of working."
Now with the center, Hammond said more young female students will consider engineering.
"It can be a great field for anyone, but a lot of girls are convinced early on that they are not good at math," she said. "It's good to see them dispelling the myth on their own."
