More than 40 young women from the Windham Regional Career Center recently attended the 15th annual state Women Can Do Conference at Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center.
Women Can Do is sponsored by Vermont Works for Women, a 25-year-old organization whose mission is to help women and girls recognize their potential and explore, pursue, and excel in work leading to economic independence.
This full-day conference featured dozens of hands-on workshops and action stations highlighting careers in trades and technology. Its intent: to expose young women to the unlimited career possibilities available to them within these fields, and to provide support to those women already enrolled in nontraditional programs in technical and career centers throughout Vermont.
Workshops were taught mostly by women who are practicing professionals in their field. They were all hands-on, designed to give students the opportunity to try out equipment and tools used in the workplace.
This included such diverse activities as driving a bulldozer, operating a fire hose, and soldering a pipe. Workshops offered this year included titles such as “Architecture and Engineering,” “Adventures in Map Making,” “Be the Next Mark Zuckerberg,” “Women Working in the Woods,” and “Talk, Text & Tweet with Telecommunications.”
Windham Regional Career Center counselor Anne Doran has escorted students to all 15 years of this conference. She sees real value in this event for the young women of the Career Center.
One student, Sarah Forrett from Brattleboro, shared that she “loved the action expo, which allowed me to try many different activities such as soil judging and extracting DNA from plants.”
Another student, Kayleigh Roberts, also from Brattleboro, said that she “loved that it was mostly hands-on rather than just a place where we sit and listen.”