Emily Foster, a senior at Kilbourne, recently went to Pittsburgh for a competition with the Worbot team and has worked hard to excel in engineering and the STEM program. Foster first found engineering at Brookside Elementary while being in the EPP program for gifted kids. “We did a month unit where we built Lego robots, so I started doing classes and loved it,” says Foster.
Worbots is a club within Kilbourne where everyone works together to make a robot and put it in competitions with other teams. The robots compete in fighting and the quality of the engineering, the team is sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) an organization that promotes engineering in youths. Kilbourne just attended the Greater Pittsburgh Regional where they became finalists and won the quality award, meaning everything was fine mechanically. Worbots gives students good engineering and social skills, “ I’m getting a lot of skills I’m going to use in college. I’m also learning a lot of skills like how to talk to sponsors and handshakes and eye contact,” says Foster.
Foster is a strong woman in STEM something Kilbourne strongly embraces, “Throughout high school, most of my classes were a third girls so it wasn’t too bad. My peers see me as an engineering student and not as a woman” she feels.
Though Kilbourne may be ahead in embracing everyone into the STEM community the rest of the world is still struggling. Only 35% of STEM occupations are women, and though the percentage of women in the STEM workforce is increasing it’s still hard to break into a place where you feel unwanted because of your gender.
“I will say sometimes because we’re still the minority, it can be difficult to bond with my classmates in small group projects. There’s almost like a kind of barrier sometimes when it comes to getting along and becoming friends with them” Foster expresses.
Foster is on her way to becoming one of the wonderful and powerful women who work in the STEM field such as Tu YouYou who helped contribute to the treatment of malaria and pharmaceutical chemistry, saving millions of lives in Africa, South China, South America, and Southeast Asia. Close to home, Ayanna Howard, the Dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University, works on making sure robots can seamlessly interact with humans as well as being the founder of the Robot Intelligence Lab to create socially intelligent robots.
Emily Foster is on her way to becoming many young girls’ role model, “My favorite part about being in STEM is becoming a role model. I never had a female role model that was in STEM and now I can be that person”.
