Sometimes in the evening, long after her last class of the day, Patricia Medina has an uncommon urge. She wants to go back to school.
"I want to come at night and just, like, make something," said Patricia, a sophomore at University High School in West Los Angeles.
What could reduce an otherwise bright, engaging student to dreams of breaking and entering? In Patricia's case, it's the lure of engineering -- the chance to build a robot or design a bridge, to create something that bears no resemblance to the typical high school assignment.
There are plenty of others like Patricia at Uni High's new Academy of Engineering, one of 13 such academies opened in the United States last fall under a national grant program. The network, which will expand to 110 schools nationally by 2012, is intended to draw more women, blacks and Latinos into engineering and generally bump up the number of American engineers.
At Uni, a school that is struggling to regain its reputation as a center of excellence, the academy is also seen as a way of motivating students.
"You're looking for students who have kind of been passed over, you're looking for a learning modality that's hands-on and project-based," said Max Rock, the head of the academy. "I think there's a pretty equal group of guys and girls who learn that way -- they don't really learn something unless they get their hands on it."
The premise behind the program is that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education and needs to act quickly or face a loss of technological preeminence.
"There's a problem with the pipeline," said Jon Reinhard, who oversees the engineering academies for the National Academy Foundation, one of three organizations collaborating on the program. "We don't have enough kids with the right background to fill the seats in the engineering programs in college."
That concerns industry leaders. The four biggest funders of the engineering academy program are the Gates Foundation, Motorola, Verizon and Xerox; altogether, some 40 tech-oriented companies are providing support. Engineers "are going to be in critically short supply as the baby boom generation continues to age and retires," said Tim McAward, vice president of Kelly Engineering Resources, a temporary placement agency that provides financial and mentoring support to the academies.
