Melissa Marshall

Ambassador program for recruiting girls into engineering―appropriate messages, messengers, and modes of delivery

Although women make up more than half of the U.S. population, the percentage of women entering engineering is much lower. To address this discrepancy, the College of Engineering at Penn State has initiated an Engineering Ambassador Program that sends female engineering undergraduates to give talks in science and math classes within Pennsylvania high schools and middle schools. The main goal of these talks is to clarify what engineers do. What distinguishes our program are the specific messages in the talks and the presentation style of our ambassadors. The messages of our programs talks come from recommendations in the recent text Changing the Conversation [1]. The primary presentation style that our ambassadors rely on is an assertion-evidence style taught in a special presentations course [2]. Evaluations of the presentations by almost 500 students at six different schools across Pennsylvania (including two all-girls schools) indicate that the presentations are highly successful at communicating the messages. More powerful evidence for the efficacy of this program lies in the volunteered responses of girls to these presentations.