Chase County female students explore STEM opportunities

It’s no secret that men seem to dominate a lot of science and engineering fields but there are more and more people and organizations out there trying to promote women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields and we are starting to see increases in the amount of women working in these careers.
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, students at CCS were unable to attend two amazing and completely cost-free opportunities that were scheduled to promote women in STEM this spring.
Yeraldin Almanza, Halle Fiedler, Chloe Soltis and Tegan Towns were registered to participate in UNL’s Women in Science Conference. According to UNL’s website, this conference is “sponsored by Nebraska EPSCoR, the NebraskaSCIENCE Program of Excellence, and the Center for Science, Mathematics and Computer Education, and this two-day event brings high school girls from across Nebraska and the Midwest region to campus to explore their interests in science careers. Women in Science is for students who want to interact with career and academic professional women in science, meet current female science students and other high school girls who are interested in science and discover countless professions as diverse as biologists, geologists, engineers, food scientists, computer scientists and those in the medical fields.”
Carleigh Lewis, Keirsten Colton, Ella Shoenholz and Brooke Schilke were all selected from a pool of over 100 regional students based on an application essay to participate in UNO’S Spring CodeCrush Immersion Experience. According to UNO’s website, “CodeCrush is an initiative of the University of Nebraska at Omaha College of Information Science and Technology’s community-run task force built to close the gender gap in the IT workforce. . .CodeCrush is ensuring that IT works to be the most innovative industry it can while empowering an entire community to be advocates for comprehensive computer science education in their classrooms.”
“CodeCrush Immersion Experiences were created to show 8th and 9th-grade girls, and their mentoring teachers, the world of IT. For three days, the UNO College of Information Science and Technology inspires CodeCrushers to take a deeper look at IT through hands-on experiences with emerging fields such as bioinformatics, IT innovation, music technology and cybersecurity.”
Although CodeCush was canceled, they did still provide online panels from some of the businesses that they would have been able to tour. If the girls answered questions to go along with watching the panels they got mailed a “swag bag” from those companies.
Last fall, Ali McNair and Molly Spicer were selected for CodeCrush and had a great experience in Omaha touring businesses, having dinners with IS&T students, staff and faculty and attending panel discussions with women in the field.
Universities websites below
https://scimath.unl.edu/csmce/women-in-science/2020/
https://codecrush.unom aha.edu/