There’s always a big battle going on to help even the odds for the people who have hills to fight up—whether it’s homelife, finances, some social issue or something else, some people just have it a bit tougher.
One thing that Oregon knows is that people with hills to fight up wind up being stronger, if they manage to get to the top. In other words, they’re really good engineers because they have the experience of fighting up that hill on top of getting the same knowledge everyone is supposed to have. And they’re passionate, because they don’t want anyone else to have to fight up that same hill.
That’s why Oregon is so great about helping out the under-served engineers. Aside from having a great and active engineering and CS community across the state, we have a ton of programs like Girls Get IT! which is actually made by a student, and a pretty active NCWIT community too, and programs to get kids into engineering.
But this isn’t just about women, either. Hispanic students are notorious for being good programmers and engineers, but being very underrepresented for one reason or another. But Hispanic enrollment at SOU just went up by 25%.
In fact, minority enrollment in general, in Oregon, is climbing steadily [pdf].
What it boils down to is this: if you’ve got it hard, for whatever reason, Oregon is a good place to be if you want to succeed. And once you get up there, you’ll be welcomed as part of the already-diverse crowd of engineers we’ve got.
Read on:
- A blog post about a brochure for underrepresented students who want to go to college, which was offered at this year’s Portland National College Fair.
- Recent news about how PSU inducted Wanda M Austin, CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, into the Women Engineers Hall of Fame.
