Samo offers new engineering opportunities

Samo has announced a new four-year engineering class that will be exclusive to the class of 2018. The school is able to offer the class as a result of a grant awarded to forty schools including Samo and Malibu High School.Students are currently being selected through an application process, and must remain in the class for all four years of high school in order to get the full experience, according to site governance member Carruth Cull (’14).It has not been decided who will teach the class, although it will likely be a current Samo math or science teacher who will receive training in order to teach the course, according to Cull.Although there are some other engineering opportunities not directly provided by the school, such as the privately sponsored Architecture-Construction-Engineering (ACE) Mentoring volunteer program, this is Samo's first academic engineering class.“This class is offered to students as an opportunity to gain knowledge about certain branches of engineering before college, so they can get ahead and discover their interests, as well as a possible future career,” Cull said.In correlation with these new classes, students from Boston University have come to present and promote majors in engineering, a field often misconstrued as a career based solely on math and science.“The summer program is driven by the need to fill jobs,” chemistry teacher Martha Chacon said. “There’s a lot of empty spaces in engineering, and a lot of world problems that need to be solved. This is a good opportunity for kids who think that there’s no writing in science, as well as the fact that there aren’t enough classes that would even lead kids to think about engineering.”According to the Institution of Engineering and Technology, there is growing shortage of trained engineering workers across all engineering sectors."We need many engineers in the world,” librarian Dana Bart-Bell said. "The ability to expose students to [engineering] supports our career initiative in Santa Monica."