A United Nations department dedicated to gender equality gave more than a dozen University of Maryland students the opportunity to learn about potential career paths last week.
Thirteen university students, 12 women and one man, went to UN Women’s headquarters in New York City on Aug. 25 to hear from different leaders within the organization about their positions and different opportunities available.
This university’s chemical and biomolecular engineering department and Women in Engineering program sponsored the briefing.
Meeting with UN Women campaign managers allows students to “see other career pathways where they can use their technical training to really help people,” said Sheryl Ehrman, a professor and chemical and biomolecular engineering chair at this university.
Students were able to hear campaign managers from four general program areas: youth strategy, HeForShe, statistics research and data, and sustainable development, Ehrman said, which allowed them to explore more opportunities.
Throughout the trip, senior chemical and biomolecular engineering major Emilia Tanu took over the Women in Engineering Twitter account. She guest-tweeted photos and quotes from speakers during the event.”This is a really great opportunity in the sense that the support is not limited to the extent of what we can offer at school, it’s on a larger scale,” said Tanu, a Women in Engineering student advisory board member. “This is the United Nations and they’re supporting and trying to work for your benefit, and I think it would be encouraging and inspiring for these students to see that.”
Several colleges and universities, in the United States and internationally, take advantage of this opportunity to bring students in contact with the organization, said Queenee Choudhury, UN Women donor relations specialist. Often the colleges reach out to the organization first, Choudhury said. “It’s encouraging to see many female students going for higher education in the traditional fields and nontraditional fields, especially in the science,” she added.
According to the Department of Commerce, women hold about half of all jobs in the U.S. but less than a quarter of all jobs in science, technology, engineering and math fields. This gap is most pronounced in engineering positions, according to the department report.
The briefing was a good opportunity to hear the speakers’ backgrounds and their personal takes on things they’re working on, Tanu said.
“You can really see the connection between technology and the social sciences and anthropology, public health, public policy, all these people with different backgrounds coming together to solve a problem,” she said.
In the engineering major, students don’t often get the chance to see other ways their skills can benefit the work of other fields, Tanu said.
“It’s a great experience to see the application of technical work in something that’s not technical,” she said.
UN Women runs several campaigns to promote gender equality, Choudhury said. For example, Ehrman said, students at the briefing heard about HeForShe, an organization that focuses on educating men about gender equality.
“[The event] gives the students an idea of different career paths and real world applications,” Ehrman said. “It was good to see everything in the real world context.”
