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Taking engineering into North Carolina's schools has been the focus of Dr. Laura Bottomley for more than a decade. As director of K-12 Outreach Programs for the College of Engineering, she reaches more than 5,000 students, 200 teachers and 500 parents each year.
The success of the outreach programs has led to such great demand from teachers that it has exceeded the College's resources. That's when Bottomley decided to ask for help from the alumni community.
“We were maxed out, and we couldn't meet the demand,” Bottomley said. “The alumni are a powerful tool for us to expand our reach.”
Bottomley scheduled a series of recruiting sessions for alumni who were interested in volunteering. About a dozen alumni attended each session.
“We got a very good response,” she said, “and we hope to make it an even wider response next year.”
But sheer enthusiasm alone wasn't going to be enough to prepare the alumni for the job.
“The knowledge of what a K-12 classroom is like these days is important (for alumni),” she said, “and they need to have ideas of what they're going to do when they get there, so we came up with the training program.”
Bottomley said that the training sessions were designed to show the volunteers how to connect with kids, and how to make a presentation that would appeal to a wide variety of students. Plans are also underway for an online training video that would allow volunteers to complete the training on their own time.
In the future, Bottomley says she hopes to expand the alumni volunteer program across the state.
“It would be nice to have a cadre of alumni across the state who are enthusiastic and ready to go, because if I got a call from Murphy, I can't go to Murphy myself, but I would be able to call the alumni there and ask them if they could go. I think that would send a strong message about our University.”
-daniel-
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