More than 100 middle and high school students converged on CSUN last spring to spend a day exploring different facets of engineering. Organized by the campus chapters of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and Tau Beta Pi (engineering honor society), Young Engineers Day featured several hands-on activities designed to engage the younger students and demonstrate how engineers think and what they do. Between 20 and 30 CSUN students volunteered for the day, becoming role models as well as facilitators.
ASME served as overall coordinator for the event, which took place April 5, and enlisted the help of the other organizations, each of which presented a workshop. ASME’s required students to use gears to move a track system from left to right based on how the gears were set up. SHPE had students perform an experiment with circuits. SAE staged a miniature soap box derby, giving the participants materials and having them design cars that then raced down a ramp. Tau Beta Pi had students use pennies to create a magnetic pulse that moved a needle. As they walked from workshop to workshop, the participating students, who came from Luther Burbank Middle School and San Fernando High School, had an opportunity to tour the engineering labs.
“The idea was to try to show students who weren’t into engineering what it’s about—to explain what engineers do and how the industry works,” says Siv Natarajan, president of ASME at the time of the event. “It got them motivated.”
By all accounts, the event achieved its objectives. Several of the students were so intrigued by the activities that they took an extra half-hour to finish an experiment and were late to lunch. At the end of the day, many of the students were overheard talking about how much they enjoyed the day because they hadn’t been exposed to engineering before.
Young Engineers Day was supported through an allocation from the Associated Students and a Diversity Action Grant from ASME’s national organization, and if past experience is any indication, it was an excellent investment. In previous years, a number of students who attended the workshops decided to go into engineering because it gave them new insights into career opportunities and helped them decide what they wanted to do with their lives.