Math Emporium Welcomes Young Female Students

Yellow school buses were scattered about the Virginia Tech Math Emporium parking lot. A group of young girls entered the building, greeted by parent volunteers. Each girl was handed a free T-shirts reading "Why Math? yO"—"0" being the mathematical symbol for zero, pronounced like "naught."

On a recent morning, The Virginia Tech Math Department held its 15th annual Women in Mathematics Career Day. Twenty different elementary schools from the Blacksburg region sent their female sixth-grade students to the Virginia Tech Math Emporium for a day of math activities and free pizza.

Dr. Robert Olin, the former head of the Virginia Tech Mathematics Department, first organized this career day in 1995 after discovering that young girls tend to turn away from math and science around middle school age, while young boys do not. Olin created this event in an effort to help young women stay interested in mathematics.

The day began with a welcome session where all 260 girls gathered to hear brief speeches from current head of the Math Department, Peter Haskell, and the associate dean of the College of Engineering, Bevlee Watford.

"Math is sometimes the only thing in my world that works every day," said Watford. The dean referenced her passion for the subject throughout her portion of the welcome session, as she explained the importance and everyday functionality of math to the audience of young girls.

Susan Anderson, Virginia Tech math professor and the career day committee chair, stepped in afterwards with instructions for the students. They split into three groups that were to rotate between the different scheduled activities. But before doing anything, Anderson gave the girls a quick boost of confidence, making them read aloud the saying displayed at the top of their free bookmarks — "Girls can do anything!"

The first activity involved a panel of female Virginia Tech alumnae who graduated with math degrees. Each woman spoke about her individual career, addressing the diverse job opportunities that mathematics has to offer.

The panel included Carrie Kilareski, an officer in the U.S. Air Force whose math degree led her to space operations, working in space surveillance and serving as commander and evaluator of a missile warning crew.

The second speaker, Destiny Leahy, is an actuarial analyst. Her job involves analyzing future risk, information used by businesses such as insurance companies and retirement agencies.

The next activity had to do with computer graphics. After quick instruction from math professor Margaret McQuain, the students went to computers where they experimented with several different computer graphics programs.

The girls entered any chosen value into equations provided by the program. The computer then compiled that information, displaying their creations of different graphs, patterns and 3-D images. As the girls finished with the activity, McQuain mentioned that they may encounter work with these types of programs in a number of fields, with geology and marine biology as just a couple of examples.

The final activity involved work with geometric shapes in tessellations. The girls were taken to computers where they made their own creations on a Web site devoted completely to tessellations.

Not only did the site consist of software programs allowing students to make their own tessellations, but it also provided instructions on how to create them by hand and facts about tessellations as artwork.

The math festivities came to an end with free pizza for lunch. After lunch, the students were asked to complete a short survey about their experience with this year's career day.

"It is very important that students fill out the survey," said Anderson, "because this is what helps us make this a better experience for them." Clearly there's no time to relish in the success of another career day, as Anderson already looks ahead to what can be improved for next year's young female mathematicians.