SALINA - What do you do with empty tissue boxes, toilet-paper rolls, cardboard wheels, rubber bands, pencils, and wire?
While most people would toss them into a recycling bin, 60 high-school, female sophomores at Lockheed Martin Corp. in Salina formed teams and built racing cars. Each team then competed to see whose vehicle would travel the longest distance.
The contest took place on Oct. 31 at Lockheed Martin's facility under the watchful eye of company engineers and 25 high-school science teachers and guidance counselors. The students' respective schools selected them for the program because of their interest and proficiency in science and math.
The program consisted of two career-fair sessions, which included demonstrations with lasers and photonics, real space-shuttle ceramic tiles deflecting heat and the conversion of energy to sound and back to electrical energy, and a tide on a homemade hovercraft. The schedule also included creative problem-solving sessions, lunch with more than 80 company engineers of whom 59 were female, and tours of the Lockheed Martin facility. The students also filled out Myers-Briggs forms - a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.
The event was the eighth annual "women-in-engineering day," which has reached out to 483 students from 35 schools on Central New York. The concept was developed by the company, which has a pressing need to hire more engineers. Douglas H. Keep, vice-president, technical operations at Lockheed Martin and the event sponsor, wrote in a letter to the students, that "engineering employment [in America] will grow by 11 percent over the next decade ... [Currently], the number of women receiving their bachelor's degree in engineering is the lowest it's been in 10 years ... The industry's need to reach out to talented young women is immense."
Katherine E. (Kate) Williams, the event chair, is one of many role models for women engineers at the company. A graduate of Liverpool High School, Williams received an engineering undergraduate degree from SUNY Binghamton in 2004 and, while an employee of Lockheed Martin, her master's in mechanical engineering from Syracuse University in 2007. Williams says "girls don't usually go into engineering because they're not strong in math and science ... Most prefer degrees in the humanities .. [The field] of engineering is predominantly male-dominated, [resulting in] a lack of [female] role models."
The need for more female engineers was supported a few days later by Ursula M. Bums, the president of Xerox Corporation and a mechanical engineer by training. On Nov. 4, Bins delivered the Martin and Phyllis Berman annual lecture al the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University. According to Burns,
"Xerox develops a new product every 11 days ... To be competitive, we [the company] need talented engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. The decline of females en-rolling in engineering school is troubling."
Lockheed Martin currently employs 2,350 at its Salina facility, the majority of whom are engineers or technicians. According to Ellen J. Mitchell, the company's local director of communications and public affairs, Lockheed Martin annually hires 5 percent of all U.S. engineering graduates companywide, gust to stay even" with current employment levels.
Mitchell also noted, "Lockheed Martin has invested $50 million over the last five years to upgrade the Salina facility."
© 2008 Central New York Business Journal Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.
