FIVE BAY VIEW ACADEMY STUDENTS TO DELIVER FORMAL BRIEFING TO TYCO MANAGEMENT
The Culmination of Tyco Fire Protection Products Seven-Month Women in Technology Program for Area High School Girls
Bay View Academy students at TYCO Left to right: Samantha Proulx-Whitcomb, Sydney Ellis, Rebekah Pendrak, Erin Dillon, Paige Noland
East Providence, RI ???????For students who attend Bay View Academy, an all-girls school, working together in an all-girls environment is a daily affair. However, the opportunity to work as part of an all-girls team of engineers through Tyco Fire Protection Products??? Women in Technology program has given five Bay View sophomores new ideas for their future. Samantha Proulx-Whitcomb, a sophomore from Warren, said, ???It???s a great experience to see what it???s actually like to be in a work environment and not just in a classroom, and also to explore engineering…It made me think I might want to be an engineer.???
And that???s exactly the result Melissa Loureiro, Manager of Physics and Modeling at Tyco???s Cranston campus, hoped would happen when she proposed the Women in Technology program.
???One of the reasons why I wanted to get this program on campus was because there weren???t a lot of female engineers,??? said Loureiro. She added, ???I would like to make this discipline (engineering) more inclusive of women at all levels – entry level to senior leadership positions.???
This year, Loureiro and a team of mentors at Tyco made it possible for twelve high school girls in Rhode Island to be included in the engineering field. They launched Women in Technology, a September-to-April program during which the students spend every other Thursday working on special projects at Tyco in Cranston, in order to fill real-world commercial needs of the company.
The program is based on a similar program run out of Tyco???s Westminster, MA facility. The students selected for Women in Technology at the Cranston campus are from Bay View Academy (five girls), La Salle Academy (four girls) and Pilgrim High School (three girls).
According to the student participants, the major benefits of the program included real-life workplace experience, exposure to possible careers in engineering and the different types of engineering, and the opportunity to meet other girls with shared interests, with a focus on teamwork and collaboration. For the girls from co-ed schools, working with an all-girls team was an eye-opening addition to these benefits. The girls spoke at a recent press conference about the difficulties in being in a classroom of boys who, they feel, don???t value their opinions. They enjoyed the chance to work within all-girls teams and see first hand that there are opportunities for women in technology.
Erin Dillon (Cranston, RI), Sydney Ellis (East Greenwich, RI), Paige Noland (East Greenwich, RI), Rebekah Pendrak (North Providence, RI), and Samantha Proulx-Whitcomb (Warren, RI) are the Bay View students who have been selected to participate. All are sophomores. According to Bill Goodwin (Middletown, RI), Bay View Upper School Science teacher, the students were selected for their track records of interest, aptitude, and success in science and math; but, also for having the demonstrated maturity, self-discipline and work ethic to handle the challenge of missing one day of academic classes every other week for seven months.
The Women in Technology participants have worked as dedicated members of three technology teams to develop products and/or systems to satisfy real-world commercial requirements. The first day at Tyco, they provided their resumes and interviewed for positions with the team leaders. After being assigned to one of three teams, their first task was to create a team name and design a logo to represent their project. The logos were then used to make team shirts. With their name and logo designed, the teams then got down to their program assignment, such as creating a system so that engineers in one building will know when there is space available in the test building without having to walk over, or improving the ???K-Factor Canon??? (which tests the discharge rate from fire-protection sprinkler nozzles), as well as transferring software to a better device.
???A?? lot of the things that they???re doing are process improvements, from the equipment that we have or processes that we???re working on,??? explained Loureiro. ???So all of their work is going to be implemented as soon as it???s done; the next day we will start using it and it will be very impactful for the team here.???