Welding camp empowers girls to enter manufacturing, STEM fields

GLoW attendees work in a welding cell during the Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs (NBT) summer camp at Triton College in River Grove, Ill. Images: Brad Mill

Tucked in the bowels of the Triton College campus in Chicago suburb River Grove, Ill., a group of students are hard at work welding, grinding, and cutting metal as sparks glow off their welding helmets. But something immediately stands out when each student pops up their mask: They are all 12- to 16-year-old girls.

The dozen or so girls are enrolled in a summer camp called GLoW, Girls Learning to Weld. In its third year running, the program is part of the Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs (NBT) summer camp series that is designed to introduce middle school and high school girls to the world of metal fabrication while teaching design and engineering. NBT is the foundation of Elgin, Ill.-based Fabricators & Manufacturers Association Intl. (FMA).

But to GLoW founder, instructor, and Triton College Engineering Technology faculty member Antigone Sharris, this camp is a sort of necessary evil.

“I’ve always had gender-neutral programming that was open to anybody,” said Sharris, who has helped run numerous STEM and manufacturing courses for kids, including FIRST Robotics and TechSavvy. “I never thought of these programs I ran as just for girls or just for boys.”

That mindset was ingrained in Sharris from the day she was born. She grew up in an Eastern European household on the north side of Chicago, where playing with Lincoln Logs, trains, and toy Jeeps wasn’t seen as something just for boys. “We didn’t have gender-identified anything,” Sharris said.

Then in the early ’80s, Sharris attended Chicago Lane Tech High School at a time when it was a true tech-based school and shop classes were mandatory for both girls and boys. That led to her enrolling in the school’s Industrial Cooperative Education (ICE) program and working with Janet Kaiser, who owns Century Metal Spinning Co. in Chicago.

“I saw this woman-owned business and was like, ‘I can do this,’” Sharris said.

So, she did, pursuing a career in the metalworking sector, which ultimately led her to her current position as engineering technology coordinator at Triton College, her alma mater.

Not long after beginning her career as an educator, however, Sharris started noticing a not-so-subtle trend at the manufacturing and STEM camps she was helping to run: a lack of girls. “What really hit it home was when I was teaching Project Lead the Way classes for one of the local schools – they were 100% boys. It was like, ‘Holy crap. This is not good.’”

GLoW came as a result of another girl-focused NBT program headed by Sharris: GADgET (Girls Adventuring in Design, Engineering and Technology), which began in 2010. But while GADgET offered courses in STEM basics, GLoW allows girls to get their hands on metalworking tools and create projects out of steel and aluminum under the guidance of Sharris and another instructor, Adele Moy, another STEM educator who teaches at Horizon Science Academy in Chicago.

GLoW founder Antigone Sharris (left) and instructor Adele Moy (right) during the last day of camp at Triton College. Image: Gareth Sleger

“I knew there was a problem, and GADgET was the beginning of the solution,” Sharris said. “And as we got a welding lab, GLoW was the next logical step.”

One student who made the transition from GADgET to GLoW is 13-year-old Miley Garcia, who said she’s had an interest in STEM from an early age.

“When my mother was looking for more camps for me that were more advanced, we came across GADgET,” said Garcia. “I thought it would be a really cool experience being surrounded by other girls interested in the things that I like to do. It seemed very exciting.”

The first time Garcia picked up a welding torch at last year’s camp, she said the experience was intimidating. But that anxiety didn’t last long.

“In the beginning I was a little scared,” said Garcia, who will be attending high school at Rickover Naval Academy School next year. “But after I did it for a little while and practiced on scrap pieces of metal, I got more comfortable with it and more confident with my welding.”

Not only has that led to Garcia using a horizontal band saw and MIG welding to build a papasan chair frame made out of metal tube, it also helped her become a leader in the shop. At next year’s GLoW, she’ll assist Sharris and Moy as a mentor to camp attendees.

“Hearing from my father that I'm doing a bunch of stuff that he wished he could do makes me feel very empowered,” Garcia said.

And that’s exactly the point, added Sharris. If schools really want to bring more people back into manufacturing, shop classes should once again become mandatory, not remain electives.

“We have to get more diversity in the STEM pathway,” she said. “You have to break the thought processes of a lot of people. And that's not something that happens in a moment. That's something that happens with exposure to multiple opportunities to different things that they otherwise wouldn’t normally do.”

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