Giving Career Advice to the President

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Professor Becky Packard Studies Youthful Aspiration
What influences a young woman from an inner-city neighborhood to choose between being a lab technician, a video technician, and a nail technician?

That's what Associate Professor Becky Packard and her team of student researchers want to know. Even President Bush has taken an interest in her work on how career aspirations are shaped among teens in nearby Holyoke and Springfield, Massachusetts.

In June 2005, Packard and other leading young scientists and engineers were honored at a White House ceremony. Packard received the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on young scientists—the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)—for her groundbreaking work. The year before, the National Science Foundation funded Packard's research with a $442,000 grant.

Key to Packard's approach is mentoring: guiding teens not only to realize their potential, but also to gain an appreciation of how math and science can help them succeed.

Working with young teens at Girls Inc. in Holyoke and other schools and community organizations, Packard looks for innovative ways in which young people are connecting to science and technology. For example, she asks teens how they see science and technology playing a role in their everyday lives: from hair care—through the chemical breakdowns of hair dyes, mousse and other beauty products—to the science of taking care of their local environment, or even the science of food preparation in the culinary arts. She also has studied a dozen girls as they made digital autobiographies using PowerPoint and talked with them about whether they saw computers in their future.

"Are we interested only in people who are engineers, doctors, and Ph.D.s, or might we be interested in what influences a young person to decide between being a video technician and being a nail technician?" In nearly every field, Packard says, a higher use of science and technology is connected with higher pay and prestige.