UW-Superior Encourages Girls To Pursue STEM Careers Through Space Camp

Maggie Sengenberger wants a career in astronomy. Or engineering. Anything related to science is what the Superior native prefers because it’s an evolving field where each day of work is different, she says.

“It hasn’t stayed the same for the past 20 years, and it won’t stay the same for the next 20 years because it’s always changing,” Sengenberger said. “…It’s full of discoveries and just moving forward instead of staying in one place. It wouldn’t be boring to go to work every day.”

Women make up almost half the labor force, but they represent just over a quarter of workers in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields, according to the U.S. Census.

To help encourage young girls to pursue a STEM career, University of Wisconsin-Superior educators held a girls’ space camp this month on campus.

At the camp, 10 girls — including Sengenberger — were getting ready to blast off their homemade rockets. They crafted them out of two-liter pop bottles, partially filling them with water. One by one, the girls rested them carefully on a network of PVC pipe and filled them with air from a tire pump until they shot skyward.

Richard Stewart, a UW-Superior transportation and logistics professor, said the university started a girls-only space camp this year to encourage and empower young women to learn and expand in transportation and STEM-related careers.

“The fact is that for a long time legislatively we prohibited women from being involved in many of these fields,” Stewart said. “Up until the mid-70s, you couldn’t sail aboard a ship as a woman. It was prohibited by law in becoming a woman officer.”

The space camp was supported by a $5,000 award from the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium. Program Manager Christine Thompson said the consortium is focused on getting kids excited about aerospace and other science fields.

“It comes back to how are we inspiring them? How are we equipping them? How are we empowering them and encouraging them to explore how they can be involved in one of those fields,” Thompson said.

The consortium provides scholarships, fellowships and outreach programs to its 28 members for K-12 students.

Emma Natale of Duluth said the camp is a place where she doesn’t have to worry about being teased by the boys at school.

“They usually say, ‘You’re just a girl. You can’t do any of this.’” Natale said. “Then, usually, I get like a better score on a test than them or complete a worksheet faster.”

But in Wisconsin, high school girls test slightly lower than their male counterparts in science and math on ACT scores, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. On average, girls scored a 21.7 in science compared to boys who scored 22.9. For math, the average score for girls was 21.2. Boys scored 22.7 on average, according to 2014-15 school year data.

During a recent visit to UW-Superior for a space conference, Alice Bowman said girls like Natale should stick with what they love through whatever hurdles they face. Bowman is the first woman operations manager for the New Horizons Mission to explore Pluto at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

“You need to understand that some of these STEM careers are challenging, but there are a lot of people around you that are willing to help you out,” Bowman said. “There are one or two classes that may not go as well as you think they should, but I would say stick with it because the pay-off is huge. If you can have a job that you really love…. It’s fantastic. At least, it’s worked out for me.”

A bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives this year that would require the National Science Foundation to support activities to expose more women and minorities to STEM fields. For Sengenberger, she said she likes the idea of more programs such as the girls’ space camp.

“Where it’s just focusing on them and helping them become more confident in what they want to do instead of keeping them with everybody else and not really showing them all these careers and stuff that they could do,” Sengenberger said.

Sengenberger said, if they’re not exposed to STEM fields, they’ll never know what they might be missing out on.