Science Camp Changes Girls' Vision of Their Future

ABC 2 WBAY news: Science Camp Changes Girls' Vision of Their Future

By Sara Kronenberg

Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton is seeing some younger students this week -- much younger.

Middle school-age girls are invading the campus for the annual Girl Tech summer program, which is opening their eyes to a future they probably hadn't thought of before.

The girls are getting their hands on things they normally wouldn't.

"Like soldering. Soldering's been my favorite, like, the whole Girl Tech," Emily Ebben said.

"I liked doing the welding classes. It was fun because you got to make, like, flower pots," Olivia Roehl said.

And they're getting ideas they didn't have before.

"I want to go into chemical engineering," Maggie Sullivan said.

This is great news to Karyn Schroeder. She works full-time for Kimberly Clark and is one of the visiting instructors at Girl Tech, which is a science camp at Fox Valley Tech for middle school girls.

"I think everyone I knew that was a scientist or an engineer was a guy, and they definitely weren't talking nail polish!" Schroeder said.

But this week she is talking nail polish -- and showing girls science doesn't always come in test tubes and can lead to a pretty cool career.

"I didn't know about engineering, science, math careers, but I really liked making my own colors, so I came up with a program that lets girls develop their own nail polish colors but also learn about the science, the research, and the engineering behind it," Schroeder said.

The girls are listening, and Schroeder is loving it.

"It's really nice to have somebody say, 'Wow, I could be like that!' or 'I didn't know that career existed!' and like 'Hmm, maybe that could be me!' They need that picture in their head of somebody they could be."