High school students attend Engineering Academy at MU

HUNTINGTON -- Shelley Yang of Charleston is considering three different careers -- dentistry, pharmacy or engineering.

She decided that the Engineering Academy this week at Marshall University might be a good way to explore that third possibility.

That's one of many aims Marshall officials have for putting on the camp the past eight years. Not only does it allow high-schoolers an opportunity to research engineering as a career option, but it helps identify some of the brightest students in the field and gives them a week to get to know the Marshall campus.

"It lets people know that if they want to pursue engineering, they can at Marshall," said Bill Pierson, chairman of the Weisburg Division of Engineering and Computer Science at Marshall. "About one-third of the students who have participated in the past seven years came to Marshall (for college)."

Whether they would have come to Marshall without attending the Engineering Academy is hard to say, he said.

Yang, a 15-year-old who will be a junior at George Washington High School this fall, said the camp has been fun and interesting so far. She's enjoyed working with a team of fellow students on various projects, such as making a CO2 racer Monday and building a trebuchet, or a catapult-type device, on Tuesday. Other projects for the week include mixing concrete and then smashing it to see how strong it was, testing water, building computer-controlled LEGO robotics and others.

"We talked to people in the engineering field today," Yang said on Tuesday. "I talked with a mechanical engineer and a chemical engineer."

The campers also get to meet and work with Marshall faculty, live on campus for a week and visit the Toyota plant in Putnam County, as well as West Virginia American Water and Chesapeake Energy in Kanawha County.

The program began Sunday and wraps up Friday.

An exciting school year for the engineering program is approaching at Marshall, which is expected to see the opening of a new $4 million engineering building in August. It also plans to graduate the first class of students with a four-year degree in engineering in May 2009.

Marshall's four-year engineering program was approved for the fall of 2006, and just completed its second full year. The students graduating in the spring of 2009 already had been at Marshall but were filtered into the program as sophomores.

The current engineering program has 120 students so far and offers an emphasis on civil engineering. With the addition, Marshall hopes to add other areas of emphasis, such as mechanical engineering, Pierson said.

Targeting soon-to-be juniors is a great way to make sure high school students get some of the preparation they need, should they decide engineering is right for them, Pierson said. Not all the campers are rising juniors, but juniors get priority.

It was a record year for applicants for the camp, said Beth Wolfe, coordinator of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Outreach program at Marshall. Usually, the camp takes 30 students, but it decided to take 36 this year. It had applicants from as far away as New Jersey and Washington state, she said.

"It started out as the Tri-State metro area, but as the program has grown, we've gotten the word out to more people," Wolfe said.

Of the 36 campers this year, most are from West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky, but others came from such states as Maryland, Texas and North Carolina.

Henry Emanuel, a junior from Hightower High School in Houston, found out about the camp through his interest in sports. He's a fan of NFL football player Randy Moss, a former Marshall player, and watched the movie "We Are Marshall." He found out about the camp after he wound up on the Marshall University Web site.

"I saw it on the Internet and thought, 'Why not?'" said Emanuel, a 15-year-old who wants to be a biomechanical engineer and work on prosthetics and robotics.

Another exciting change with the camp this year is that more girls applied than usual, Wolfe and Pierson said.

"It's hard to get girls interested in engineering, and we have 15, our biggest crop of girls so far," Pierson said.

"Obviously, engineering has always been a male-dominated profession," Wolfe said. "To have these girls come to a summer camp and show how much they're interested in studying engineering in college -- that's something we're really excited about."

Anyone interested in information about next year's Engineering Academy can contact Wolfe as soon as they'd like via e-mail. She keeps a mailing list of students and their parents who are interested, and will send out brochures and applications. Wolfe can be reached at beth.wolfe@marshall.edu.