Amy Bloom, Assistant Professor of Geography-Geology; Laura Vogel, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences; and Sarah Walczynski, Director of the Laboratory for Integrated Learning and Technology along with two professionals from the community (Dawn Perry, Town of Normal Water Engineer and Zahia Drici, IWU Professor of Mathematics ) were paired with seven 6th graders from Ms. Jane Sumrall’s class at Parkside Junior High School for this year’s Career Pen Pals Project. Through the Career Pen Pals project, the women professionals served as mentors to the students by corresponding with the students in response to their career questions. During a recent visit to the school to provide Ms. Sumrall’s class with a full set of the Career Pen Pals Project exhibit materials, other students posed career and science questions to Ms. Perry and Dr. Vogel on topics such as job satisfaction, transferability and usefulness of skills, water recycling processes, health issues, and mutations in nature.

For over 12 years, Grace Foote Johns has designed, created, and installed women-in-science Women’s History Month exhibits for the Normal Public library as part of the Physics Department's outreach efforts with the EYH Conference and AWIS-HOI. This is the second year in a row that the exhibit theme was the Women in Science, Math, and Technology Careers Pen Pals Project. The exhibit, which includes pen pals correspondence and pictures, is on display at the Normal Public Library, Parkside Junior High School, and on the AWIS-HOI (www.phy.ilstu.edu/~AWIS-HOI) website.

"By mentoring all of our academically talented students, our society benefits from their contributions to furthering scientific discovery and the innovative applications that often result from those discoveries," said Johns.