Industrial Engineering Student Returns to Where It All Began

Amy Shell

Sarah Nesmith, right, attended GirlTREC when she was in middle school. This year she volunteered as a university student for the program.

Sarah Nesmith was in middle school when she attended GirlTREC, a transportation engineering summer day camp hosted by the Maritime Transportation Research and Education Center (MarTREC) at the U of A.

MarTREC is a U.S. Department of Transportation University Transportation Center led by Heather Nachtmann, professor of industrial engineering and the Earl J. and Lillian P. Dyess Endowed Chair in Engineering at the U of A. Nesmith worked this past summer, "all these years later," as a GirlTREC ambassador before entering her sophomore year as an industrial engineering major. 

Established in 2017, GirlTREC provides an opportunity for rising sixth- and seventh-grade girls to spend a week with engineering faculty and student ambassadors such as Nesmith. Campers engage in hands-on activities such as experimenting with different soil types, learning about bridge design, programming autonomous Lego vehicles and demonstrating lock and dam models.

This summer the campers visited the Walmart DroneUp hub to watch a drone delivery, took an Arkansas & Missouri Railroad train ride, visited Thaden Field airport in Bentonville and operated the driving simulators at Fayetteville Public Library.

While progress has been made, women still only receive about one-fifth of U.S. undergraduate engineering degrees awarded.

"To develop the engineering workforce of the future, we must expose students to engineering and science at a young age and show them how engineering careers are fun, challenging and critically important," says Nachtmann.

Nesmith remembers how important it was that young women encouraged her to pursue engineering when she was a girl. She hopes that campers hearing her story about being a camper at their age — and now seeing her as a GirlTREC ambassador — gives other girls the confidence to know that they can succeed on a path to careers in engineering.

To learn more about Nesmith and GirlTREC, view this new video produced by the College of Engineering.