Around 50 Participants Attended the 1st All-Girls STEM Camp at UCN

The “All-Girls STEM Camp” was created to instill careers related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics among primary and secondary school-aged girls. This camp is coordinated by the Feminist Industrial Civil Engineering Collective (Colectivo Feminista de Ingeniería Civil Industrial, COFICI), sponsored by the Faculty of Engineering and Geological Sciences at the Universidad Católica del Norte (UCN) and its Industrial Engineering Department, the General Student Directorate and SQM.

The program involved a full week of activities, including 15 talks and the participation of 20 student mentors from engineering programs at UCN, who held workshops on geology, solar energy, 3D printing, Lego assembly, chemistry experiments, structure design and robotics.

Constanza Miranda, a 16-year-old student from Colegio Corazón de María school, applied to the camp and actively participated in each session. During the closing ceremony, she remarked that “it was a wonderful experience, the camp was an opportunity to highlight all our skills, they motivated us to believe in ourselves, and through various workshops we were able to learn many things that are taught differently at school. Here they showed us how these would be taught at the university, so I am really grateful to the girls for organizing this.”

“What the collective achieved is very relevant because around 50 girls from a variety of primary and secondary schools arrived, and our aim was for them to see themselves reflected in our students because there is only a small age difference between them. Also, the focus of these workshops is to bring them closer to the profession, since engineering has its formative years in mathematics and sciences, and it is difficult for school-age girls to understand or visualize themselves in this profession,” explained Hernán Cáceres, dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Geological Sciences at UCN.
Bárbara Blümel, Assistant Manager of Talent Attraction and Diversity at SQM, said that “we need to incorporate more women into STEM-related careers, both on a technical and university level, and therefore, the development of these programs is extremely important for the participants to understand what science means and how it is incorporated into our daily routine. We hope that this initiative will be replicated throughout the year in nearby secondary schools to continue empowering female students from early on in their education.”

In Chile, only 20.3% of women enroll in STEM careers and the Universidad Católica del Norte is no exception. Only 24.9% of women enroll in the Faculty of Engineering and Geological Sciences, and in Industrial Civil Engineering the figure is much lower, at 21.8%.
Regarding these indicators, Carolina Rojas, director of the Department of Industrial Engineering, commented that “there is a gender gap in most labor fields and normally this problem is addressed from humanities, so today we are making a difference from engineering, where we aim to provide solutions to different problems. For a long time, these problems have been resolved with the perspective of only half the planet, but this other half, which is missing, has an important perspective to contribute.”