The School of Engineering and Technology (SOET) is working to attract students directly from High School and various Junior Colleges. One of the programs we are putting together is targeted at grades 11 and 12 along with College freshmen and sophomores. The idea is to nurture this group into developing business experience by actually launching a business but from a technology perspective. I thought that we could collaborate with Junior Achievement to assist us with grades 11 & 12. As you probably know, Junior Achievement helps train students K-12 to manage a business. Their mission will ensure that every child in San Diego and Imperial Counties has a fundamental understanding of the free enterprise system.
It was from this perspective that I invited Melissa Minas, Director of Education, Junior Achievement of San Diego and Imperial Counties over to National for lunch. She accepted and showed up right on time today. I introduced her to Dr. Howard Evans, Dean of SOET and we settled into a nice lunch in a private room off the main cafeteria.
It is so important for us to encourage students to pursue science, math and engineering. Somewhere along the line students in this country began a slow but steady distain for science. Maybe it was too hard of a topic or maybe the way it was presented via an antiquated scholastic system turned off students. I believe it is the latter argument.
My goal here is to make engineering and technology fun and I believe a way to go about doing that is to create an environment whereby students are exposed to various situations that stimulate them to begin to realize on their own the merits of approaching science from a “user-friendly” perspective.
An example is Sports Science or Sports Engineering. By starting with a topic of interest, like your favorite sport, then posing a challenge that brings out a need for science understanding naturally creates such an environment. When kids start to question how to build a better tennis racquet or how to design a new front air dam for their car they start to realize how understanding science makes their life better.
Having a continuous flow of new students into science, math, engineering and technology will make your life better too!
Anyway, thank you Melissa for the meeting and let’s see where we can take this idea!
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