Sparking an interest in science, math

Jolene Bradstreet fell in love with forensic science long before shows such as “CSI” made it popular.

Bradstreet discovered forensic science as a Bigfork Middle School student after attending a crime-scene investigation session at an Expanding Your Horizons seminar.

“I came out of the criminal investigation class determined that’s what I was going to go into,” said Bradstreet, now 31. “I came out of Expanding Your Horizons with kind of tunnel vision as to what I was going to do because it was so interesting.”

The national program is designed to interest girls in math, science, technology and engineering courses. Seminars offer girls a chance to learn from women currently in careers in those fields.

The Flathead’s annual seminar, sponsored by the valley’s Soroptimist clubs, took place Tuesday at Flathead Valley Community College. Close to 250 seventh- and eighth-grade girls from Northwest Montana attended the event, chairwoman Diane Yarus said.

“It was awesome. It went very well,” she said.

This year’s seminar included sessions led by first-time presenters, including some like Bradstreet who had attended an Expanding Your Horizons conference in junior high.

Bradstreet, a personal banker with Rocky Mountain Bank in Bigfork, led a session on personal finance.

While she enjoys banking, she acknowledges it isn’t the career she once planned to pursue. Her determination to work in forensic science lasted from about seventh grade until her junior year at Wichita State University in Kansas. Bradstreet planned on earning a criminal science degree and possibly going to the FBI Academy.

Her plans shifted when she got the opportunity to visit with an FBI agent. Bradstreet realized that a job that could include last-minute red-eye flights to crime scenes across the country likely wasn’t compatible with a lifestyle that included a husband and children.

So Bradstreet turned to banking, which she enjoys — although she has never lost her fascination for forensics.

“It’s not nearly as glamorous as it looks on TV by any means whatsoever,” she said. “But if I went back to college, I would take electives in that field. Those are the only classes I got straight A’s in in college.”

Lauren Casey, who also was a first-time presenter at this week’s Expanding Your Horizons conference, said she, too, remembers the forensic science session she took at a conference as a student in Somers Middle School. She also sat through sessions in veterinary medicine and radiology.

The conference sparked a desire to pursue some science-related occupation, although Casey said she didn’t have a specific job in mind as a 13-year-old.

She was left with an impression about the “super interesting careers” available in science fields, she said.

“I wanted to take as many science classes as I could in high school to keep doors open and have the right background when I went to college,” she said.

After graduating from Flathead High School, Casey attended Stanford University and earned a master’s degree in energy engineering. Now 28, Casey has been a volunteer with the Montana Energy Corps AmeriCorps project since October.

She taught a session on renewable energy at Tuesday’s Expanding Your Horizons conference. Her class included a wind turbine demonstration and a solar oven, with which Casey baked the girls cookies.

The snack may have inspired future energy engineers. When one girl quizzed Casey on solar power and the ease of creating a solar panel, Casey explained that the chemistry and engineering behind solar panels are actually quite complicated.

“But you can make a solar oven really easily,” Casey told them. “One girl said, ‘I’m going to go home and make a solar oven.’ It was really cute.”

While every girl wasn’t interested in every session, each class at this year’s conference got rave reviews from someone, Yarus said.

“Every single workshop was a favorite for somebody in the crowd,” she said.

That’s a success, when the program’s goal is to encourage girls to stick with math and science classes in school, she added. Expanding Your Horizons formed in 1974 when female scientists and teachers grew concerned about the low number of girls taking math classes, according to the organization’s website.

Letting girls see professional women in nontraditional careers such as construction and engineering can be inspirational, Yarus said. The conference also lets girls see how math and science apply to real jobs.

“They’re at that age when math and science can become geeky,” she said, adding that students are thinking, “When am I ever going to use this in my life?”

At the conference, girls see how applicable math and science are to many careers — “so just hang in there,” Yarus said.

That’s the message Bradstreet said she wanted girls to take from the conference.

“I hope they’re empowered to stay in school and learn as much as they can and believe that really they’re capable of anything if they’re willing to work for it,” she said.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.