Girls can be engineers, too

Cal State Long Beach is holding its first Engineering Girls @ The Beach this Friday from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to encourage fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade girls to pursue engineering, math or science as a career.

Girls from Chavez, International, Roosevelt, Stevenson and Kettering elementary schools will attend four 30-minute workshops involving hands-on activities in the aforementioned fields. According to the CSULB Web site, the activities are modeled not at the college level, but in a way that younger students can understand.

For more information, visit the College of Engineering.

Computer science on the rise... or not

Enrollment in U.S. computer science programs increased last year in comparison to previous years, according to an article published today from The New York Times.

The number of computer science majors was up 6.2 percent from 2007, according to the article.

Cal State Long Beach's statistics do not match up to these, however.

According to CSULB's Institutional Research and Assessment On Demand Reporting, there were 343 students pursuing a bachelor's in computer science in fall 2008, a 1.4 percent decrease from the 348 students in fall 2007. There are about 2,610 students in the College of Engineering.

There was, however, a 12.8 percent increase in master's students: 117 in fall 2007, 132 in fall 2008.

The article also said that women earned 11.8 percent of computer science bachelor's degrees in 2008. A November 2008 article reiterated that point, with the number of women receiving computer science degrees falling more with each year.

At CSULB there were 35 women in the undergraduate computer science program last semester, or 10.2 percent of the program.

The article from last year attributes the decrease to the stereotypes of "the nerd" and "the geek," though it also suggests a move toward fields such as graphic and Web design. However, it remains "a matter of dispute," according to the story.

A recent Cornell study proposes a different reason: The underrepresentation of women in math and science careers is due to "their need for greater flexibility and the demands of parenting and caregiving."

Graph from The New York Times