Designing a Futuristic City as a Child Sparks Engineer’s Passion for STEM

Jo Etter fell in love with building stuff when she was in sixth grade. She was an exception. Studies show that most girls start to lose interest in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math – in middle school. Now, Jo is working against those statistics, and is part of some big science conversations.

She first discovered her passion for designing and building when she took part in a middle school science and engineering competition called Future City (below). Her team created a virtual metropolis, wrote an essay about it and then built a scale model. Jo still remembers how excited she was when they won the national finals for their city of Apricus – city of sun – which ran on solar energy.

Later, in high school, Jo found her way into other exciting science projects, like this “Scrambler” competition in the Science Olympiad. Jo’s team was challenged to mount an egg to the front of a car and get it to the wall as fast as possible – without breaking the egg.

After landing a job as a scientist, Jo recalled the value of that original Future City project. “I have been an engineering mentor for the program over the years,” she says. “This last year I was a finals judge, so it was fun to be on the other side of it.”