The Impact of Mini University
by Alexia Camacho
Every semester, the UC Berkeley SWE section holds Mini University, a one-day event that is meant to help high school students from historically underrepresented backgrounds learn more about STEM at Berkeley, through several interactive workshops, lab tours, and getting to hear the personal experiences of current engineering students and professors. In a “normal” semester (although it may be difficult to reimagine what “normal” even means at this point), around 60–80 students are excused from school to attend this event. Ultimately, the goal of Mini University is to inspire students to pursue engineering and have them experience a day in the life of a Berkeley Engineering student.
What sets a program like SWE’s Mini University apart from others? This program encourages minority students to see the many different possibilities as an engineering student, and see the ins and outs of Berkeley Engineering. When I was in high school, I never attended any events like this or even knew about anything of the sort. I kind of just chose engineering because I knew I liked math and science, but I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into. At UC Berkeley, roughly 18% of the student population is composed of students who are recognized as underrepresented minorities. This number is far less within the College of Engineering and other STEM programs, and gradually decreases once you get into industry.
As a woman of color in engineering, it took a huge toll on me to not see very many people that looked like me in any of my classes. I felt unmotivated when the course material took me much longer than others to internalize and understand. At many points, I wasn’t sure that engineering was for me. However, this is far from the truth. One of the reasons why I wanted to be the Mini University Chair was to make sure that our participants felt represented and that they felt confident in pursuing engineering. I wanted them to feel empowered, and know that there would definitely be struggles throughout their college careers, but that these very struggles would ultimately make them stronger. Finding a community, whether that be SWE, HES, BESSA or any other club on campus, was the most valuable piece of advice I wanted to pass on to our participants.
So this semester, my apprentice and I took on the challenge of figuring out how to make this program beneficial to students in an online format. Would students even want to attend? Do these students already have Zoom fatigue? How do we keep this program as interactive as possible, given our limitations? We decided to spread out what used to be a full one-day event into a 3-day program, and emailed the local schools that were already on our mailing list, in addition to advertising Mini U across large Facebook groups/ Slack channels with high school students all over the country. A big challenge was working with other clubs who were interested in volunteering and figuring out what workshops we could host that would keep our participants entertained. We decided to hold two workshops a day, which ranged from current professors giving inspiring speeches to interactive activities with CS/ 3D Design/ Machine Learning, etc. Our maximum attendance ended up being around 150 students, which is the most we’ve ever had!
Although the online format limited us to think outside of the box for this odd semester, it also helped us reach students who weren’t local. We even had a student tune in all the way from Sweden! At the end, we gathered feedback from our participants and were happy to hear that everyone enjoyed it! The very first ~virtual~ Mini University was a success, and served as a great learning experience for the next virtual Mini U. If you’re a UCB student interested in helping out with Mini U next semester, check out our General Meeting #1 for committee applications! If you’re a high school student interested in participating, feel free to email swe.miniu@gmail.com and we’ll add you to our mailing list for Spring 2021!
Happy holidays everyone and good luck on finals! ❤
