Helping Atlanta-Area Students Find Their Path to a STEM Degree

“We wish these college students to depart concerned with pursuing a level in STEM and, most significantly, understanding that there are a number of pathways for them to pursue STEM levels,” De La Fé stated.

Diana Ayala is a senior at McClure Well being Science Excessive College in Gwinnett County who’s planning to use to Georgia Tech to pursue a biomedical engineering diploma. Diana realized on the convention that, even when she isn’t admitted as a first-year scholar, she nonetheless might understand that dream by certainly one of a number of switch pathways, together with one for first-generation school college students.

“I at all times centered on getting in [to Georgia Tech] as quickly as I utilized,” Diana stated. “Now that I do know [about transfer options], it is a reduction, as a result of now I do know I nonetheless have one other strategy to get in.”

Diana and the opposite college students spent a piece of the day engaged on a timed engineering design problem that required them to work in groups to construct a three-level cardboard funhouse. They needed to design the home to permit a golf ball to journey from the highest to the underside. College students have been assigned randomly, so most had by no means met any of their teammates earlier than.

“It was a very nice expertise working with totally different folks from different faculties, studying extra about why they’re right here and the place they need to go,” Diana stated.

Bridges-Mathieu, the engineering trainer from Arabia Mountain Excessive, stated the problem was an ideal instance of the expertise problem-solving she works on along with her college students.

“They need to work with a gaggle of people who they do not know. They need to learn to work as a staff with a purpose to clear up a activity or drawback. And that is what engineering is about,” she stated. “We’re at all times utilizing the assets that we now have with a purpose to create sustainable options.”