STEM for Girls Connects Kids with College and Real Life

Genny Lambert scans the impressively expo-fitted Saratoga School gymnasium, the same way a proud mother would watch her daughters head off to college. It's a brief moment of reflection amidst the chaos of more than 100 excited young girls, dressed in matching light blue shirts, bouncing past the diverse selection of career fair stations that line the walls.

It was only three years ago that Lambert, a teacher at the co-ed Saratoga campus of the Waukesha STEM Academy, had the dream of creating an event that would help young girls realize that a career in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field was not reserved only for men.

“It all started with my idea — my passion — to make sure that there’s more girls in the STEM fields,” said Lambert, who was teaching at Randall, the elementary school of the Waukesha STEM Academy, when she felt the inspiration. Lambert’s principal at the time approved her idea and from there she rounded up some interested parents, struck up a partnership with Carroll University and formed a small committee.

Fifty kids attended the event in its first year. On April 12, the third annual STEM for Girls drew more than 120 students from 10 Waukesha middle and elementary schools and presentations from 24 different programs, ranging from the Humane Animal Welfare Society of Waukesha County to a Carroll University geology station called “Glacier Goo: Experimenting with Glacial Flow.”

Friday night’s event blended together young female students learning about different jobs in a STEM field, local college students and teachers currently applying STEM practices and even a guest speaker live from her New York office who acknowledged she wishes she could have gone to a STEM school. 

Guest speaker beamed in

The festivities started at 6 p.m., where each girl registered her name and received a T-shirt. From there, they were ushered into the gym, where they gathered in front of a television equipped to beam in the event’s guest speaker, Maya Draisin, the associate publisher of Wired magazine, who told the girls to follow their dreams and stressed to them how lucky they were to have this kind of an event available to them at their age.

After Draisin’s webcam speech, it was time for the students to rotate through the stations assembled in the gym, the training sessions in the classrooms and the state-of-the-art thermal energy lab (aptly nicknamed STEaM). The students were able to pick which two sessions they wanted to attend ahead of Friday night’s event. Each classroom session offered a unique experience that educated the students through advanced equipment, from Carroll University’s blood typing experiment to GE’s “fun with ultrasound technology” lab.

“What I like about this event is exposing the kids to technologies that we’re using at the college level and what they might see in careers,” said three-time STEM for Girls participant Dr. Terri Johnson, from Carroll University, who showed students how to have fun with computer coding in one of the classrooms.

The gym portion of the event took on more of a career fair experience. Students got a first-hand look at what avenues they could take later in life in a STEM field, like at Froedtert Health, where Sasha Brellenthin, an interface system analyst, was in charge of her company’s station.

“I want to provide the girls with the information that there are other types of jobs out there that don’t have to be necessarily a generic type of job,” said Brellenthin, who was at her first STEM for Girls.

Students were privileged to be in the company of STEM-related professionals like Leah Luke from the department of education, who is a former State Teacher of the Year in Wisconsin. Waukesha STEM Academy eighth grader Anna Gill took the networking opportunity seriously.

“Usually we just hear about (the jobs) from teachers who don’t really know what’s going on behind them,” said Gill. “So I like learning about them from someone who has experience in it.”

Lambert might take offense to Gill’s comment about uninformed teachers, but she would be happy to hear that her job fair might have helped open a door for one of her students — which is exactly what she set out to accomplish three years ago.