By Trey Phillips, Staff Reporter

Senior Christina Lee has been selected as one of only 23 EngineerGirl student ambassadors for the 2020-2021 school year.

“I remember feeling pretty happy but it was just out of the blue and I remember being taken by surprise,” Lee said. “My parents actually didn’t know I applied, I told them after I got in. They were happy and I think my sister was probably the proudest for me because she did know I applied and has always been very supportive of me.”

EngineerGirl is an organization that seeks to inspire young women to go after careers in the STEM community. Their mission is to help build leadership skills, make a difference in the local community, and promote careers in STEM fields among young women.

“The reason I wanted to become an EngineerGirl is because I’ve always been really interested in STEM,” Lee said. “I’ve just noticed that (STEM is) not as encouraged for females as it is for males, in Conestoga I’ve definitely noticed it.”

The organization runs a number of community driven seminars and workshops throughout the year. However, due to COVID-19, these events have since been moved online and are being planned for later this year.

“Initially it was proposed that we would hold different engineering or science related workshops throughout the school year at the Tredyffrin library, but obviously they can’t do that because of (COVID-19). So they adapted it so now we’re working to have a few virtual workshops towards the end of this year that are related to STEM,” Lee said.

All ambassadors would usually undergo training by the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) in a conference in Louisiana. However, this training has since been moved to a number of biweekly virtual sessions the ambassadors attend.

“The most recent workshop we had was last Friday, it was on virtual teaching and learning strategies so we know how to teach workshops in a virtual setting and how to engage students virtually. Another one we did was choosing and designing quality classroom activities so we learned how we could organize workshops that would be effective and interesting for the girls,” Lee said.

This training is supplemental to their duties as ambassadors and they are already in the midst of planning their virtual workshops later this year, among other interviews and activities.

“At the same time I am interviewing women engineers and scientists to see why they got interested, and to share the interviews on the EngineerGirl website and other platforms to give young girls an idea of what it’s like to be an engineer as a woman, and to hopefully get them more interested in becoming engineers,” Lee said.

Lee is optimistic about the opportunity she has been presented.

“I’m just really excited to be working with the EngineerGirl organization and I’m very thankful for the opportunity and I’m looking forward to our outreach project throughout the year and seeing where it goes,” Lee said.

Trey Phillips can be reached at [email protected]