Overview

Berkeley’s Girls in Engineering (GiE) is a K-12 outreach program aimed at increasing diversity in engineering. The program runs a summer camp with four week-long sessions, designed and taught by UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students, and annually serving 120 Bay Area middle school students.

Started in 2014, GiE provides a safe, supportive, and inclusive space for students to gain exposure to and build capacity in STEM through hands-on workshops and real-world problem solving. This immersive experience exposes campers to a broad range of STEM fields and offers campers a chance to develop hard and soft skills, hone their critical thinking and creative problem solving skills, and gain intuition, understanding, and confidence through doing.

Targeting historically underrepresented communities and students with limited STEM exposure, GiE strives to pique the curiosity of students that may otherwise overlook STEM fields as a possible career path.

GiE is open to any San Francisco Bay Area students entering 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. We offer full and partial scholarships and free camp meals to increase access for students who otherwise would be unable to attend camp.

Team Projects

Throughout the week, campers work in teams to develop an engineering solution to a problem of their choosing. These projects are a great way for the participants to use their new knowledge, learn how critical creativity is, and discover the many ways engineering can improve their world.

To prepare for their poster presentations, the students participate in a workshop that focuses on public speaking. This workshop, like many of the soft skills workshops, is focused on general professional skills that are important for many careers, not just engineering careers.

Finally, we invite all interested family members and friends to join us on Friday afternoon, when the campers present these projects to their guests. This is a fun way for the participants to share part of what they’ve been learned during the week.