Engineers Week is February 19 – 25
February 19 – 25 is National Engineers Week. The week celebrates the impact engineers make on our daily lives and encourages young people to consider engineering as a career. For a trade association, AWC employs a lot of engineers and we see the week as an opportunity to openly share the kind of work our staff undertakes every day to ensure that the buildings in which we live and work are safe.
Among their many responsibilities, AWC’s engineers get very involved in the development of building codes, the regulations that control how buildings may permissibly be built across the country. With technological advances and innovations regularly affecting the use of wood products, AWC is committed to ensuring these developments are accurately reflected in the codes and properly implemented by industry professionals. That’s why our engineers work so closely with our building code staff in developing our code change proposals that expand the opportunity for safe wood use. It’s a lot of technical work meant to make sure that building codes evolve with current industry technology.
Girl Day
Additionally, and importantly, “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day” is Thursday, February 23. If you’ve had a chance to see the movie “Hidden Figures,” you’ve witnessed the extraordinary yet mostly unsung engineering contributions women made to the early space program. The movie shows the significant talent women brought to the profession. Yet, still fewer women than men choose engineering as a profession.
AWC has worked hard to change that paradigm and is committed to the cause of getting more women into engineering. A diverse workplace fosters diverse thinking. In the engineering world, we need more of this diversity.
To encourage this, check out the Q&A we did last year with two of AWC’s female engineers sharing what they think young girls should know about engineering: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/girl-day-making-difference-engineers-robert-glowinski.
As you will read, AWC encourages both men and women to be mentors for girls thinking about the types of professions that might interest them. We want to inspire these future engineers to see they too can change the world, as AWC tries to do every day, by making our built environment safe.