APTOS — Santa Cruz AAUW, American Association of University Women, celebrated the AAUW’s Tech Trek 20th anniversary at Seascape recently.
While members and guests enjoyed lunch, Lois Holcomb, past president, spoke of the beginning of Tech Trek in 1989 with a grant from AAUW and of sending Santa Cruz’s first Tech Trek girl to Camp Hopper at Stanford.
Tech Trek is a week-long STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) related camp held on college campuses in the summer. AAUW’s Santa Cruz branch has been raising money to send seventh grade Santa Cruz County girls to the camp for the past 19 years.
This year Santa Cruz AAUW was able to provide scholarships for six girls: Samantha Rubio-Campos, Maddie Petersen, Zoe Nguyen, Chloe Millar, Grace Shipp and Brooklyn Llamas.
While at the camp, girls had the opportunity to explore individual STEM specialties, go on field trips and receive mentoring from women in STEM.
At the luncheon, each girl spoke to members about camp experiences: coding, marine biology, forensics, and the women mentors who came to the camp to speak about their careers. Among the mentors were an ICU nurse and mother; a woman who heads Pixar’s lighting department and a woman from Amazon who spoke about the creation of artificial intelligence.
A mother of a former Tech Trekker, Sally Hancock spoke about her daughter (an Aptos High graduate and a current Columbia engineering student) who built wells in an African village over winter holidays, on her way to achieving her Tech Trek ambitions.
Susan Chollar, a recently retired science teacher, spoke of the teacher’s role in the Tech Trek selection and shared new plans for Santa Cruz Science Fair’s STEM Mentoring Program for County schools.
To help Tech Trek girls continue their STEM interests beyond summer camp, AAUW Santa Cruz is working with UCSC WISE Women. Carolyn Park and Anna Johnston have founded SIS (Science Impacting Society) as part of WISE and are offering monthly Saturday STEM programs to inspire young women, specifically, to pursue education in STEM fields by providing science-related experiences with successful female role models.
For information about AAUW and supporting Tech Trek, visit santacruz-ca.aauw.net.
