By Zach Spicer
Before participating in five activity stations, the 18 middle and high school girls attending the third annual Jackson County Girl Powered Workshop heard from five local female engineers.
Samantha Walters is a systems engineer for Cummins’ corporate office in Columbus, while Wesley Loxley is a mechanical engineer and Abigail Cassell is a manufacturing engineer at Cummins Seymour Engine Plant, and Lauren Ferrenburg is a senior machining engineer at the Seymour plant’s machining center.
Carmen Rutkowski works for AISIN USA Mfg. Inc. and is another type of engineer, working in quality.
All five discussed their jobs and how they landed there with the hopes of inspiring the next generation. While engineering is still a male-dominated field, more females are following that career path.
“If you know your stuff, you can go far,” Walters said during the workshop Oct. 7 at Seymour Middle School.
“It’s not just knowing your stuff,” Rutkowski said. “You can know everything about your process. You also really have to be able to stick up for yourself.”
Walters continued, “I know what I know, and you can’t tell me that I don’t, that’s so important every day.”
Walters said she earned a degree in business administration and human resources management but took a different career path when she was hired by Cummins.
“I had lots of excellent, excellent mentors who got me to this point, who taught me the things that I know today to get to where I’m at and lots of people to lean on,” she said. “Cummins does a really good job of that … that sort of fosters this environment of helping each other. I learned everything I learned, and Cummins was like, ‘Honorary engineer, here you go. You meet the requirements for as far as how far you got in your degree.’ Just because you start someplace does not meant that’s where you’ll end up, and if you love doing systems and figuring out how things work, it’s a journey, but you can do it.”
Loxley has a degree in mechanical engineering and stayed with that field in her job at Cummins, where she fields quality issues for engine customers.
Cassell earned a degree in robotics engineering technology and landed a job in the engineering field at Cummins, where she works in assembly.
Ferrenburg has a mechanical engineering degree and completed three internships with Cummins while in college. Her work involves programming, working with her hands, sourcing and interacting with customers for two engines that generate power for hospitals and AI data centers and have locomotive and marine applications.
“Engines we all work with directly are very important, and we definitely feel that in our everyday job, and it’s really cool, as well,” she said.
Rutkowski earned a neuroscience degree and then had to choose between continuing her studies in graduate school or entering the workforce. She didn’t have lab experience for grad school, so she looked for a local opportunity and became a chemist at Particle Dynamics in Seymour.
She gained experience in quality documentation and process control and then landed an opportunity at AISIN. She’s a quality engineer in the door hinge department, where she checks parts to ensure they fit together properly for automotive customers.
“It’s a lot of Excel sheets and emails and meetings and thinking, a ton of spreadsheets, looking at a lot of data,” she said. “It’s a ton of learning and not something that I really expected but something that I’m very happy to learn.”
After the engineers introduced themselves, they joined the girls as they rotated between stations focusing on four different engineering disciplines.
For mechanical engineering, they built a miniature straw rocket. For civil engineering, they built a Da Vinci bridge. For electrical engineering, they made a light-up greeting card. And for chemical engineering, they made gooey gak.
They also could pick one of two Lego sets to build. Those kits were purchased through a $1,000 grant from the Seymour Walmart store that Jackson County Industrial Development Corp. received.
The stations were organized by Jamie Baker, coach of the Cortland Elementary School robotics team who also helps with the Seymour High School robotics program. She led the workshop with Amy Jo Miller Kuzel, who coaches robotics at SMS and SHS.
Baker said Girl Powered Workshops started in 2016.
“Girl Powered is about redefining the students’ picture when they think of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math),” Baker said. “Too often, girls and other students from underrepresented communities do not see themselves reflected in fields like robotics, engineering, coding or aviation. Through these workshops, Girl Powered centers girls’ experiences while inviting students, families, mentors, educators and teams to help build more welcoming STEM communities.”
Baker said she has a mechanical engineering degree and has been coaching robotics for 10 years, and all three of her daughters went through the Seymour robotics program and completed Work-Based Learning at AISIN USA. One is an electrical engineer for Subaru, and the other two are computer science majors.
“I love girls in STEM,” she said.
