Bench Talk

Camsie McAdams at Discovery Education describes her unique approaches to developing and scaling up opportunities for all students to explore and pursue STEM, such as organizing local excursions, creating accessible digital content, and connecting students to STEM professionals.

When I first started writing about RF and microwave technology back in the 1980s, one of the first things I heard was that the industry suffered from a shortage of RF and microwave engineers and that the situation was becoming increasingly dire. As the story went, engineering students avoided the discipline because it was perceived as more difficult than others, that universities were not encouraging students to pursue it (and few even offered it), and that the “real money-making engineering opportunities” lay elsewhere. I still hear this story today from company presidents and engineering managers, so a quarter-century later I would assume that the situation would have risen from dire to catastrophic.