Mississippi Power holds iCan Girls in Engineering Camp
These future engineers are going to change the world one day as they participate in Mississippi Power’s iCAN Girls in Engineering event.
Members of the Mississippi Power community are teaching young women to say ‘I can’ and are hoping they’ll leave saying ‘I will!”
The purpose of the iCAN Girls in Engineering camp is to inspire these school-aged girls that they can be successful in the field of engineering or STEM-related disciplines.
The girls went from station to station and completed several hands-on and creative projects that related to civil, chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering. Camp Participant Emmarie Smith said, “When I heard about making high heels I was like ‘oh yeah immediately I wanted to sign up’ and I heard about making spa stuff and I was like ‘oh yeah I definitely want to sign up and then I started to tell all my friends about it and they signed up too.”
One of the Mississippi Power employees helping at the shoe station is transmission project engineer, Alyssa Gates. Gates attended the iCan camp just nine years ago, and she’s here in hopes of inspiring young women just like those women back then inspired her. “I did this program in the ninth grade and it was such a rewarding program. Before then, I didn’t know about engineering at all and then what I did know was it was for men, and so this program is really just an opportunity for girls to just see that engineering can be so much more than what they originally think it is, and I think it’s great that we get to pour into the community because at Mississippi Power we do like to grow our engineers and hire women in STEM and engineering, so this is really just a great opportunity for the girls here.”
She has done exactly that because right after her camper Mackenzie Bowser left her station, she told News 25 that engineering has definitely sparked her interest. “I thought it was like a pretty cool camp and you got to do a lot of experiments and you can do a lot of stuff that’s fun and it’s good for older and younger kids to experiment on things that you want to do when you grow up.”
