GirlEng Western Cape Infomation Session - Phenomenal Success! - Women in Engineering, South Africa (SAWomEng)

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GirlEng Western Cape Infomation Session - Phenomenal Success!

by Hema Vallabh on Wednesday, Mar 10th, 2010

The Western Cape Chapter of GirlEng held a highly successful debut Information Session on Saturday 27 February 2010 at the University of Cape Town. GirlEng received an overwhelming response to the Information Session with almost 200 highly enthusiastic grade 10-12 learners in attendance, which was twice the expected number.

More than 20 schools from the Cape Town area and also farther inland in Overberg and Citrusdale area were invited to attend the 3 hour event. Invitations were carried out by holding short presentations at the schools and at teachers’ workshops in addition to making calls and faxes. The Information Session was also attended by the GirlEng Director - Hema Vallabh, the SAWomEng Co-Founder-Naadiya Moosajee, representatives from both the Engineering Student Council at the University of Stellenbosch (US) and the Institue of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), teachers and some parents.

Prior to entering the venue, each girl was given a GirlEng Info-Pack which contained a schedule of the day’s events, a workshop application form, a GirlEng booklet, Engineering handbooks provided by the University of Cape Town ,a list of the criteria required for admission to university in addition to a comprehensive list of engineering bursaries. The day’s scheduled events then started out with an introductory talk about SAWomEng followed by an icebreaker so as to get the learners to get to know each other, relax and have a bit of fun before the engineering presentations begun. In preparation for the Info-Session, each GirlEng Mentor had been assigned an engineering degree on which to give a 5-minute informative presentation. Each mentor was also required to set up a stall with various models and displays to further illustrate their assigned degree. Every presentation was followed by a brief question-and-answer session between the learners, the GirlEng Team, Hema and Naadiya with the learners’ participation encouraged and rewarded with a range of spot prizes.

A tea break was scheduled after the presentations and the learners got a chance to interact with the GirlEng Team on a one-on-one basis. The learners also used the opportunity to look at the various displays which included a wind turbine, electric motors and posters to name a few. After the tea break, the team gave a presentation on what GirlEng was all about and encouraged the learners to apply for the workshop to be held later in the year.

The Information Session ended with an exciting Grande Finale where the learners were requested to showcase their artistic side by performing a poem, rap or song about GirlEng. The winning trio was composed of three friends from Wynberg Girls’ High School who brought the house down by ingeniously involving the 200 people in the audience in a GirlEng-themed Battle Cry.

Since the Information Session, we have so far received more than 30 workshop application forms, which is highly encouraging because this event is about 2 months away. We also got great feedback on the facebook group by the following Monday. We found that about 8 people joined the GirlEng facebook group over that weekend. One of the learners was so excited that she wanted to study engineering already, even before attending the workshop!

Below are some of the messages that they posted: