CBC: Highlighting our female engineering students

The CBC recently highlighted our female engineering students who are building race cars, a common academic task in the University of Manitoba Student Chapter of SAE International, or UMSAE, which is the second largest collegiate branch of the SAE — Society of Automotive Engineers — in the world.

The final trails for SAE are approaching and the students are preparing their vehicles for racing. The U of M has four teams that design and build vehicles ranging from race cars, to off-road vehicles, to aeroplanes.

But as the CBC reports:

…this year’s Formula race team is anything but traditional. At the head of the team is a woman named Carolyn Blonski.

She says she’s seen a change in female membership on the team during her time at the University of Manitoba.

When she started on the team four years ago, she was the only woman on the Formula team. Now she works alongside five other women.

Blonski says she always knew she wanted to be an engineer, regardless of her gender.

“I used to play this game called Rollercoaster Tycoon…. I remember talking to my dad about it saying, ‘what do I have do for a living to actually design these for life and get paid for it?'” she said.

“He said, ‘you’d have to be an engineer.’ So I said, ‘OK, that’s what I’m going to do.'”

As faculty adviser Ed Hohenberg told the CBC: “It used to be a rare thing to see women in this building and in the shop….[Now] they’re not afraid to get greasy and come in and play with noisy power tools. And it’s great.”

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