It may be mere coincidence that Smith College is located in Western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley. It’s a perfectly appropriate place, though, for an institution that students and faculty proudly call “a pioneer in women’s education.”
That was true when Smith opened in 1871 and it’s true today. The college now claims pioneer status in another area, engineering education. On May 16, Smith became the first U.S. women’s college to award bachelor degrees in engineering science.
Four years ago when Smith launched the Picker Engineering Program–named for the late Jean Sovatkin Picker (the name as published has been corrected in this text), a 1942 graduate and former UN official–part of its goal was to remain true to the legacy of Sophia Smith, whose inheritance financed the college’s early days. Her will stipulated that Smith offer “other studies as coming times may develop or demand for the education of women.”
With women receiving just 18 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees in a world with a growing demand for engineers, Sophia Smith’s vision became a mandate for the college, which already had a long history of educating women in the sciences.
“Before coming to college, I didn’t know what an engineer was,” Susan Strom, 1 of the 20 graduating engineers, said a few days before receiving her degree. “I certainly didn’t think I was going to go into the field. Then I got to Smith.”
Now a newly minted engineer, Strom starts work this summer as an engineering manager with Gilbane Co. (the name of the company as published has been corrected in this text), a large construction management firm in Providence, R.I.
She will join an engineering work force that, according to 1999 figures complied by the Society of Women Engineers, was only 10.6 percent female. In 1983, 5.8 percent of employed engineers were female.
Although more women than men are enrolled in colleges today, they gravitate toward fields like psychology and biology, which have seen dramatic increases in female graduate rates, according to a recent Business Week Online report, “2004 Women in Tech.”
In designing an engineering curriculum from its program unlike traditional ones. And that sets it apart from what Picker program director Domenico Grasso calls the “just chalk and talk” method of teaching, meaning, he said, that “the material [goes] from the notes of the professors to the notes of the students and through the minds of neither.”
For students like Strom, that made all the difference.
Smith provides “a really supportive environment where they want you to do whatever it is that you think you can do,” said the 21-year-old from Encino, Calif. “For example, even though I wasn’t good at math and I didn’t really know what engineering was, [the Smith faculty] was willing to take the time and educate me.”
Also making the Smith program unlike big university engineering programs is the fact that Smith puts a strong emphasis on social responsibility; oral communication and presentation skills; and immersion in the liberal arts, the heart of the college’s curriculum.
Students, Smith President Carol Christ said, are “learning engineering in a liberal arts context that educates them about the social issues, the policy issues, the ethical issues that are involved in solving engineering problems.”
Smith’s environmental engineering courses, for example, emphasize environmental sustainability and the safeguarding of natural resources. Students also discuss ethical issues, such as the fact that environmentally hazardous facilities are often disproportionately located in low-income areas.
“We wanted to make the program socially relevant,” Grasso said. “And that is really the main reason women have been marginalized in engineering. Because they see no real social relevance of engineering to society.”
Another reason, too, is that traditionally male-dominated programs haven’t always been hospitable to women.
“Engineering colleges struggle with the attrition of women students and what they attribute attrition to is peer hostility and obviously there isn’t peer hostility at a women’s college,” said Christ, a former English literature professor who spent 31 years at the University of California at Berkeley.
In fact, many of the students extolled the program’s “non-competitive” nature.
Nicole Radford, of Michigan City, Ind., who graduated with a concentration in civil engineering, found her classmates “willing to help each other. There were only 20 of us, so we were definitely tight-knit.”
By most accounts that’s due to the relative newness of the program, which students and faculty said is still establishing itself as it seeks to add new courses and more faculty of which 60 percent are female, versus 4 percent nationwide.
The next step for Smith’s program, Grasso said, is to seek accreditation from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. An engineering program cannot get accreditation until it has graduated its first class. Over the summer, Smith will submit a self-study to ABET in preparation for a team of evaluators to visit in the fall.
The engineering program also has helped Smith attract donations from leading corporations–donations that an all-women’s liberal arts college would normally not get its hands on. Ford Motor Co., General Electric Co., Hewlett-Packard, Motorola Inc. and Boeing Co., among others, have lent corporate advisers and technical and financial support to the Picker program. And the Smith engineering students get an added benefit: the chance to hold summer internships at the companies.
Besides turning out female engineers, Smith is making sure that “part of their study is environmental stewardship and social consciousness, and that is a terrific combination” for a company like Ford, said Andy Acho, worldwide director of environmental outreach and strategy for the automaker.
Ford gave $10 million toward construction of a new engineering building to house the program. Still in the design phase, the $65 million building, Christ said, will be “an example of sustainable design … a kind of teaching tool, not just a place where teaching happens, but a building that can itself be used for teaching.”
In the meantime, classes are held in a temporary building and some professors divide their time between engineering and other departments, but those are just minor issues for a program that is helping Smith make a statement about the direction of engineering education–and women’s roles in the profession.
For female faculty like Judith Cardell, who once worked in the industry with “a lot of men,” the program generates excitement of a feminist sort.
“I really like seeing just all women in the classroom and seeing [that] they’re more willing to talk,” said Cardell, who earned her doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
And for the handful of engineering students on a campus heavily weighted toward the liberal arts, their presence stood out.
“A lot of people are really excited for us,” said Radford, the graduate from Michigan City. Students who were not engineering majors often told her, “you guys rock.”
