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Girls Lead the Way
February ​at the Colorado School of Mines

Our annual Girls Lead the Way conference is a full day of hands-on learning designed to introduce high school girls in grades 9-12 to engineering and applied mathematics concepts and the Mines campus. The day begins with a welcome and introduction to the event, followed by major panels where women from Mines speak about their respective majors and answer questions. After the panel, girls are broken into smaller groups according to their interest in majors, and attend their first of three hour-long, interactive activity stations hosted by Mines faculty and students. We will then give an hour for lunch break. To close out the conference, girls can take an optional campus tour with Mines Ambassadors.
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The hands-on sessions are overwhelmingly the most impactful part of the day, and make participants more aware of the wide variety of majors and careers available. Participants report feeling more confident in their abilities to pursue their passions in STEM.
Girls Lead the Way prepares participants to:

• Articulate different majors at Mines and their application to a variety of industries
• Demonstrate their interest in STEM with continued involvement in related course work, interests, and extracurricular activities

Rocky Mountain Section founded the Girls Lead the Way event with the first event being held at the Colorado School of Mines. After the inaugural event was a success, the Colorado School of Mines Section stepped into leading the event coordination with Rocky Mountain Section's continued support. 

Learn more about this year's Girls Lead the Way!
https://orgs.mines.edu/swe/girls-lead-the-way/

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Highlights from a previous GLTW

The  Rocky Mountain professional section of the Society of Women Engineers and the Colorado School of Mines collegiate section partnered to host this event for the fourth year.  The purpose of the event is to get more girls interested in STEM career fields as well as provide training for future leadership roles. The event was held at the Colorado School of Mines where the participants attend preselected classes and workshops that focus on leadership skills as well as exploring science and engineering careers.

The event had a lot of positive feed back including :

• “I have always known that I have wanted to go into engineering, but need guidance on how to get into the program, so this really helped me.”

• “I would recommend this to my friends who are interested in STEM fields.”
• “I really liked being able to see what success looks like for females in STEM. It also gave me the opportunity to see what different STEM majors were like.”
  
• “I really enjoyed the various activities because I got to learn more about Mines and the other girls participating in the conference while making and building some really cool projects.”