Last Saturday, Swarthmore hosted roughly 150 seventh and eighth grade students from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware for the national Expand Your Horizons conference. The EYH conference fosters young women’s interest in mathematics, sciences and engineering, and it encourages them to pursue their interests beyond middle school. According to Nicole Belanger ’08, the Swarthmore coordinator of the conference, the students came from 45 different high schools in the immediate tri-state area.

The conference, funded by a grant from Swarthmore, featured a variety of different workshops, all math and science related. Many of the workshops offered were hands-on, such as the “Alchemy: Turning Pennies to ‘Gold’” workshop, in which students tried turning pennies to gold while learning “a little about chemical reactions on the way,” according to a hand-out.

Belanger explained that this workshop was a favorite among students, as was the “Chemistry is Colorful” workshop, in which students mixed and separated different solutions to “experience the brilliant colors of chemistry.”

Read complete article here: http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2006/03/30/news/conference-connects-with-middle-schoolers

This upcoming Saturday, a hundred and fifty middle school girls and their parents will descend upon Swarthmore. Have we already started recruiting for the Class of ’15? Not quite. Swarthmore College will be holding an “Expanding Your Horizons” conference in order to encourage young women to continue their studies in math and science.

This is the second year the college has held the conference. Nicole Belanger ’08, conference coordinator, came up with the idea last year, when she received funding from academic departments to bring eighty girls from twenty-seven different schools to campus. “We unfortunately had to turn fifty girls away last year,” said Belanger, “so this year we applied for a Swarthmore Foundation Grant that would let us bring a hundred and fifty girls to campus.” Demand for such a conference is huge, however, and some girls will still have to be turned away.

Read complete article here: http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2006/3/23/second-annual-expanding-your-horizons-conference-inspires-middle-school-girls-to-stay-in-science/