Sarah Cunningham, Edison K-8 School
Sarah Cunningham, Senior Product Manager at Autodesk, visited Carla Zils’s third and sixth grade classes at Edison K-8 School in Brighton on May 14. Ms. Zils’s students had been learning about engineering and related careers, and Sarah’s visit connected their class discussions to real-world applications.
A key element of the Pathfinders program is the way visits are differentiated for specific grade levels and circumstances; in this case, Ms. Zils’s third graders had just taken the MCAS in the morning! To keep energy levels high and the students engaged, Ms. Zils started the visit by having the students guess what they thought a civil engineer did, write it on a sticky note, and place it on the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. The students had excellent guesses: that civil engineers make stuff, fix stuff, or teach new things.
After the students had made their guesses, Sarah started her visit by sharing a picture of herself in third grade, noting, “When I was in third grade, I loved art and music, and I had no idea what a civil engineer was.” She went on to share a video slideshow of what civil engineers work on, emphasizing that civil engineers design and build “all of the things that make it easier to live in our world” – things like roads, bridges, buildings, landfills, water systems, and airport runways. Sarah also included pictures of her office, her colleagues, and events where she gave presentations, offering an additional lens into her day-to-day experiences.
At Autodesk, Sarah works with developers to create, test, and implement civil engineering software. To connect this to students’ lived experience, she asked for suggestions of apps that students use, and it turns out that Minecraft is kind of like what civil engineers use to design their projects! She also highlighted the school subjects that help prepare someone to be a civil engineer (math, reading, and art), the people skills that are helpful in her career (communication and teamwork), and that every job within the field requires other unique skills that you learn while you’re there.
One student asked, “Are the classes hard?” To which Sarah reassuringly replied, “Sometimes. But the important thing is to make friends, and your friends will help you study the hard things. But you don’t have to be perfect to be a good engineer.”
