As a doctoral candidate, I spend a lot of time holed up in my office on the fringes of the Penn State campus. I do a lot of reading, tinkering with STATA, managing data sets in Access, and generate pages and pages of writing. That all might sound like a special form of hell but I actually really like it—even though sometimes it gets a little lonely. The rewards for this hard work are numerous and definitely include the opportunity I had in July!
Each summer West Virginia University organizes and hosts several engineering camps aimed at middle and high school students. These camps are intended to introduce and demonstrate different aspects of engineering. Many of the demonstrations and activities are done by those in engineering fields interested in sparking a passion in the next generation of engineers. Proud Mountaineer (and great friend of mine), Sarah Soliman, connected me with the Freshman Engineering program, who organize the Engineering Challenge camps, and before I knew it, I was planning a presentation on transportation safety.
I had never had to communicate to pre-college students about what I work on before but I was up for the challenge. I came up with so many ideas but when I tested these ideas on my husband and even ran some across my advisor at Penn State most fell flat. I did not learn about transportation safety in an hour long seminar, I could not expect the same from high school students.
I thought it was going to be a disaster. One afternoon, Chris and I went to Buffalo Wild Wings, ordered a bunch of appetizers and lemonade, and decided we were going to figure it out. We went through page after page on a legal pad. We realized that we had found gold when we had listed the different sources of safety countermeasures and I had a case study in mind. The presentation came together.
First, I introduced myself and how I found myself in this field. How, when faced with the closure of I-15 while en route to Las Vegas, I both enjoyed an afternoon at the outlet mall in Barstow and found my direction for life. Second, I explained, in very broad terms, the different areas that may contribute to safety countermeasures: education/the social environment, design and operations, vehicle characteristics, and policy/law.
So, I effectively gave the campers four different tools. Then I presented a case study. West Virginia House Bill 4223 increased the potential penalties for passing a stopped, unloading school bus in the wake of the death of 6-year-old Haven McCarthy on a dreary Lincoln County day. I divided the campers up into groups and asked them to develop a technology that could prevent similar, future crashes and then lobby each other for the best solution. Each group was given a different field to develop a countermeasure from.
At both camps, the in-vehicle countermeasure was the most popular. But the overwhelming majority of groups developed reasonable and often ingenious solutions to helping prevent future school bus related pedestrian strikes. Likewise, it helped to illustrate the different types of engineering necessary to improve road safety as well as the importance of good communication, even in engineering.
I could gush for hours but the bottom line is that it was just so much fun! It was awesome to get to share my enthusiasm for this field with, hopefully, future engineers and that they also seemed to have a great time. Let’s Go Mountaineers!
The Mountaineer and I (wearing the t-shirt from the first camp I participated in)
