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SLU Hopes Fun, Math Draw Girls to Careers

Posted on: Saturday, 1 April 2006, 18:00 CST

By DEBRA LEMOINE

SLU hopes fun, math draw girls to careers

HAMMOND - The next step in recruiting more women to math- intensive careers is to persuade them that such jobs offer social interaction, Southeastern Louisiana University experts told 57 high school girls Friday.

The teens, selected by their schools because of their good grades and mathematics skills, arrived at the university for a friendly math competition and a pitch from the university's math and teacher training departments that math is an interesting career track.

Getting girls into math classes in high school is not the problem, said math Professor Tena Golding, director of the university's Center for Faculty Excellence.

"It's in college that we see a lot of females who don't chose careers that involve a lot of math," she said.

Research shows that girls still face some discrimination from their high school and college teachers who feel that girls can't do well in math. But that "can't-do" attitude has now diminished to a great extent, SLU math Professor Melinda Holt said.

Instead, researchers find that women students tend to drop out of math programs at the undergraduate level or don't go on to math- intensive programs at the graduate level, Holt said. They tend to prefer the medical field because the profession requires interacting with people, she said.

"Girls see math careers as having no social aspect," Holt said. "They are going to the ones that are social. We in mathematics are not playing up the social aspect of the field."

Girls and young women also don't like the competitive learning environment prevalent in math, engineering and "hard" science courses, Holt said.

Using a grant from the National Council of Teachers in Mathematics, the university invited the girls to Friday's day-long event in which they competed in solving word problems and had lunch. They also listened to speakers from various math-intensive disciplines.

The idea was to show the teens there is a future in pursing mathematics, organizers said. Holt said the day's favored speaker in that regard seemed to be Robyn Kuhn, a Southeastern graduate seeking a master's degree in biostatistics, which lends itself to the more socially appealing medical field.

As two 10th-graders from Lusher Charter High School in New Orleans went around the campus solving math problems, neither teen seemed eager to pursue a math-based career. The girls made 11 stops around campus, working out math problems that tended to be about the place they visited.

For example, the math problem at the Student Union emphasized the recreation facilities at the union while asking the girls to figure out how many pool balls and sticks were purchased for the building.

Janie Planchet, 16, got the right answer, making her group the first that day to be able to figure out the mathematic solution to the problem.

Planchet said she can do math but it isn't her favorite subject. She said she often gets nervous on math tests because of the time pressure and makes errors. Even some of the Southeastern math problems gave her trouble.

"I can't do this in one minute," she said.

Her dream job is far from one that would require her to be constantly dealing with numbers and algebraic equations.

"I really want to be a Broadway actress, but I don't think I need advanced math like calculus and stuff to do it," Planchet said.

Her friend, Victoria Chester, 15, is leaning toward a science career but is torn between being a biochemist and a novelist.

Discovering new medicines to cure diseases is appealing as well as opening up the potential for adventure as a biochemist, she said.

"I hate the exploitation of rain forests for discovering new medicines," Chester said, "but I like the adventure of exploring."

Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.

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