By Onyekachi Akpotohwo, WiSci STEAM Camp participant
By the end of this decade, the world will be in need of millions of scientists and engineers. I want to be one of those engineers, working to make the world a better place. This is why I was so excited to hear about the WiSci STEAM camp 2015 and overjoyed when I got an email saying that I had been selected to participate in the WiSci: Girls STEAM Camp in this summer.
One of the main reasons behind the camp was that there is a shortage of female expertise in the STEM fields.Thinking about how women are acknowledged in my country, I don't blame girls for losing interest in the field.
Many people believe that when you go into STEM fields, you are confined to working in a lab, an oil company or with a construction company, but this is not so. These people have have failed to look into the opportunities that these jobs bring. Scientists and engineers today find themselves in many industries, from food to fashion to entertainment and the lot!
Creating and marketing a single product like a shoe, for instance, draws from a lot of expertise from all sorts of occupations. You will need a materials engineer to figure out the best material to fulfill your purpose, an architect to provide you with a model for your shoe, investors to invest in the production, a marketer to market your product, and a project lead to tie it all together. The same thing applies for making a computer; many people and companies contribute in the making of a computer. A materials engineer is needed to source the most suitable material for the computer hardware, an architect to provide a model for the computer, a chip making company like Intel to create the chips in the system, a software engineer for software which includes the operating system and application packages, a sound engineer to work on the sound system, and many other people.
So you see, studying a STEM subject opens many doors for you in whatever industry you want, be it in manufacturing, entertainment, fashion, food, anything at all, as long as you've got a creative mind. Why not give it a try? Build something, look to attend a science and engineering camp, create a game, attend science classes at school, enter a competition and see if you enjoy it. If you do, Big Sean says "nothing is stopping you".
Good luck.
Onyekachi Akpotohwo (Kachi) is 16 years old and currently lives in Lagos, Nigeria where she is in her final year of the IB diploma program at Greensprings School. Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue a career in engineering. She loves reading, writing, taking pictures and participates in athletics when she needs to blow off some steam.