In June 2004, the first class of twenty women engineers graduated from the Picker Engineering Program of Smith College (Northampton, MA).
Smith is the largest U.S. liberal arts women's college. It was founded in 1871. The Picker Engineering Program was named for 1942 Smith graduate and former United Nations official, the late Jean Sovatkin Picker.
Picker is the first degree-granting engineering program at a U.S. women's college. It's also the only engineering school in the country where a majority of the faculty, 63 percent, is female.
The program takes an unusual approach to the teaching of engineering, especially compared to traditional programs at other prominent universities and colleges. Every student is required to take a significant number of courses that are not in her primary area of study, like languages or philosophy.
Graduates receive their degrees in engineering science, and while they may concentrate on one engineering discipline, the object of the program is to give them a broad grounding in the practice of engineering, and to integrate their engineering studies with their liberal arts studies. Now that the first class has graduated, the school will apply to the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) for certification. When the certification is received, the first class's degrees will be retroactively accredited.
Caitlyn Shea: a broad perspective
Graduate Caitlyn Shea is taking her next step in engineering as a grad student at Notre Dame (South Bend, IN), one of five colleges that has agreed to recognize Smith's degrees even before ABET accreditation. Shea is very grateful for the preparation Smith gave her. In comparison to graduates of other engineering programs, "I have a much broader perspective on engineering," Shea says.
Shea, whose family lives in Northampton, has always been fascinated by science and its relationship to technology. She wanted to explore many branches of engineering, and the Picker program gave her that opportunity.
She didn't start on her journey to engineering with Smith College in mind. "Actually I didn't want to go there. I was looking at more traditional programs," Shea says. But with some convincing from her mother, a Smith graduate, Shea enrolled at Smith. Being close to home was an added bonus.
Any worries she had about the program were quickly erased by its director, Domenico Grasso. "We learned a lot from him, and I think he learned from us too," Shea says.
Summer learning
The learning didn't stop when each school year ended. During the summer after her junior year, Shea and six classmates conducted a research project they called NASA's 135, or the "weightless wonder of the world."
"We heard a lecture the previous year about NASA and decided to perform our own experiment," Shea says. "The purpose of the experiment was to decide how the perception of spatial orientation was affected by altered states of gravity. We had a large covered basket that was heavily lined on the inside and placed on a big Lazy Susan. A subject would lie in the basket while we rotated it fast enough to produce something close to a weightless state. We would then ask the subject what distance had been covered. We found the subjects were unable to judge distance when they were weightless."
Shea and her fellow scientists then visited Johnson Space Station (Houston, TX), where they toured the NASA facility and were able to conduct their experiment again using more sophisticated equipment.
Packer graduates from Picker
Julia Packer, who is from Holliston, MA, also feels she got a lot out of her Picker Program years. The experience, she says, taught her about collaborative work. "You learn how to build a team," she says. "It can be frustrating, but it's a great learning experience."
Packer, like Shea, first looked at more traditional engineering schools like the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "The classes were huge there, and at Smith they're a lot smaller," Packer says. The Picker Engineering Program was just enrolling its first students, and it sounded exciting, so she went for a tour and was hooked.
Packer doesn't feel she's missed out by being in a broad program. "There's really not a big difference in what I learned versus what people who strictly majored in one aspect of engineering learned," Packer observes. Packer concentrated in computer engineering, but also took courses in environmental, civil and mechanical engineering, as well as an honors course in Latin.
"It hasn't really sunk in that we were the first graduating class," Packer comments. "We've gone through so much as a close class that we've become great friends."
During her four years at Smith, Packer interned at the Mitre Corp (Bedford, MA). "Smith helped us with getting internships and our future jobs."
Now working full time at Mitre, Packer is focused on systems engineering. Her day-to-day responsibilities have her programming and designing a prototype that stores information about flights at the organization's Air Force center. "You work on one project as little or as long as it takes, and then move onto the next," Packer says.
Smith College continues to develop the Picker Engineering Program. Donations for expansion have come from Ford Motor Co, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, General Electric, the Boeing Co, and IBM, and the list keeps growing. Ford alone has contributed $10 million toward the erection of a new science and engineering facility.
Smith graduates like Shea and Packer continue to educate themselves at work and in the classroom. Says Packer, "We are the pioneers who will hopefully bring more women engineers into the world."
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