CASS Outreach 2025: Encouraging School Girls to Pursue Engineering: SHE in ECE Event
IEEE Circuits and Systems (CASS) in collaboration with IEEE Electron Device Society (EDS), IEEE North Jersey Section and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at NJIT hosted the SHE-in-ECE event, fourth annual one-day summer camp for female high school and middle school students on NJIT campus on July 1, 2025. SHE stands for “Soaring High-powered Excellence.” This year the focus was to pursue female students to take up Electrical and Computer Engineering as their career and IEEE EDS as their future professional society. The program was organized from 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM with a theme SHE in IEEE and SHE in ECE.
A total of 106 girls, rising 7th to 12th graders, from local schools attended the event in 2025 (Fig. 1). Students were welcomed by Prof. Durga Misra, IEEE ED/CAS Chapter Chair of North Jersey Section. He highlighted the potential for these young women to become leaders in technology and innovation, developing new technologies in high-tech industry and in space research. Prof. Misra also emphasized the role of IEEE programs such as the Try-Engineering initiative and expressed gratitude for the financial support from the IEEE EDS and IEEE CASS. The student group represented diverse backgrounds. Each students received a t-shirt and a tool kit for the hands-on activity.
Ms. Marjorie Perry, CEO, and sole principal of MZM Construction gave the opening keynote. She asked the students to take a pledge to consider becoming an engineering and encouraged them to join STEM and work hard to take up leadership roles to advance the technology of the future. Furthermore, Ms. Perry inspired the girls to be courageous and mentioned how electrical engineers and computer engineers are leading the way from self-driving cars to wireless communications using their mobile phones. She also encouraged them to do well in science and mathematics in school. Following the opening keynote, Ms. Chitra Venkatraman, retired Telecommunication Engineer from Nokia gave the plenary presentation. She talked about how women engineers have significantly improved the quality of life of humanity. She encouraged the students to be curious for everything in life. She described her life story, detailing how a poor little girl became an engineer and secured financial stability while contributing to the development of new technologies.
Following the plenary talk a panel discussion was held. It was moderated by Distinguished Professor Wunmi Sadik, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. She introduced the panelists. The panel consisted of women faculty members and industry leaders in the engineering field and WiE leaders of IEEE. The academic panelists were Ms. Lucie Tchouassi, Associate Dean for Academics, Newark College of Engineering, Prof. Ratna Raj of the ECE Department and Prof. Elisa Kallioniemi of Biomedical Engineering Department of NJIT. The industry panelists were, Dr. Anisha Apte, Sr. Design Engineer at Synergy Microwave Corporation and IEEE R1 WiE Chair, and Mrs. Carol Benitez, Vice President of Operations at Greener by Design. Each panel member described their life’s journey in a 3-minute presentation and went to the tables for an ‘up close & personal’ chat with the students. There were printed questions in a bowl and the students were happy to pick a question to ask the panelist. In general, the panelists had a very cordial discussion with students and advised the students how they can think about selecting their career. The panelists told the students to be strong and brave as a female engineer, explaining that female engineers make a significant positive impact in new technology development and innovation.
After the panel meeting the students were divided into four groups for a campus tour. The hands-on activity was guided by Mr. Gil Hernandez and Christopher Benjamin from the ECE Labs. The students were given a Snap Circuits Green Energy from Elenco Electronics to work on several projects (Fig. 6) involving solar energy, mechanical energy and wind energy. Many students were able to build an electric car.
They were quite excited to build their projects and worked very hard. The students and staff volunteers helped them if they had any difficulties. The instructions were displayed on their tables with laptops. In addition, the instruction slides were also displayed on two large screens. Once they completed the projects, they were happy to display their functionality.
Some senior students worked on an advanced project involving an embedded systems challenge with an Arduino (Fig. 9). They had to download a piece of code into the provided laptops that brought the physical systems to life. The students were able to take the Snap Circuits Green Energy kits home to continue working on and exploring other projects. Later in the afternoon the students had snacks and interacted with the current female ECE students in an informal environment to learn more. Furthermore, many of the girls from different schools helped each other and made friends during the event.
At lunch time NJIT’s admission office guided the high school seniors about the application process and declared that the application fee will be waived if they apply to the ECE Department or any engineering program for their undergraduate studies at NJIT. Two of our staff members, Ms. Teri Bass and Ms. Ryoko Mathes, of the ECE Department at NJIT worked tirelessly from January 2025 to make the SHE-in-ECE event a success. Around 15 female ECE students worked as volunteers to make sure the students to had an excellent time.
There were more than 145 registrations, and 106 female students attended. The event was conducted in a large conference room with round tables for convenience. Many of the parents were waiting in the venue to observe how their daughters are engrossed in the electrical/computer engineering projects.
In 2025, we conducted a survey to receive feedback from the female high school and middle school students at the end of the program. Seventy students, who attended the program, responded. More than 84% agree and strongly agree that they have learned more about electrical and computer engineering after attending the event. A significant amount ofstudents were also encouraged (45.7%) to consider ECE/Tech as their choice of major in college. Out of the responders we had 42.9% Asians, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; 38.5% African Americans and Latinos, 15.7% Whites.
Reported by Durga Misra