[113] MTSU ROTC Cadets Will Help 'Map' Girls' Futures at EYH Saturday

Release date: Sept. 24, 2010

News & Public Affairs contact: Randy Weiler, 615-898-5616 or jweiler@mtsu.edu
EYH contact: Dr. Judith Iriarte-Gross, 615-904-8253 or jiriarte@mtsu.edu

MTSU ROTC Cadets Will Help ‘Map’ Girls’ Futures at EYH Saturday


(MURFREESBORO) — Courtney Fultz has a longstanding fondness and passion for MTSU’s Expanding Your Horizons in Science and Mathematics.
She attended with a Girl Scout group as a sixth-grader in 2000, and her association with EYH did not end there. For the past four years, she has helped girls map out their futures.
The Murfreesboro native, who is a senior recreational-therapy major and ROTC minor, will supervise a team of Blue Raider Battalion cadet colleagues in a geoscience presentation called “Finding Your Way.”
Theirs will be one of numerous EYH workshops across campus on Saturday, Sept. 25, for the fifth- through eighth-grade girls attending the middle-school EYH and the separate workshop for high-school students.
"The presentation consists of teaching young ladies how to read a topographic map and how to use a magnetic compass,” said Fultz, who will be joined by co-presenters Elizabeth Juergens of Clarksville, Kim Isham of Franklin, Jennie Fajardo of Thompsons Station, Rachael Lezon of Cleveland, Tenn., and Kelsey Kirby of Goodlettsville.
“We’ll teach these young women how to find certain sites within a grid square, how to shoot an azimuth and how to get your pace count,” Juergens said. “The girls absolutely love it, due to the fact that it’s so different than most things they have experienced or been exposed to.”
"These are life skills everyone should know, even though technology has advanced,” Fultz said.
"Also, it’s a blessing to be able to give back to the community, since I was once a participant in EYH. I remember how excited I was as a sixth-grader coming in to learn about math and science. EYH is definitely an event young ladies will never forget.”
Fultz said her presentation has so many participants because “they can assist the girls at the different stations we have set up for map reading and compass. Also, they volunteer to get experience teaching a class, which we do several times in ROTC.”
Fultz, who plans to graduate in August 2011 and be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, has devised “a list of topics for each compass and map-reading class and assigned them to the co-presenters. It’s very structured. We go through the ‘crawl, walk, run’ phases.
"First, we teach in the classroom and get some hands-on, mainly with the maps. Then we’ll go outside and go through some exercises with the girls, utilizing the compass. The hour we have never seems to be enough, but we brief the basics and what’s important for each class.”
Another outstanding array of on- and off-campus presenters will lead the workshops, said Dr. Judith Iriarte-Gross, an MTSU chemistry professor and the director of EYH and the Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Center.
This includes a group of women from Smyrna-based Nissan North America. Four of them—warranty manager Ashley Gatlin, a mechanical engineer; safety department member Jennifer Kaufmann, a chemical engineer; manufacturing manager Lisa Haaser, whose specialty is statistics and probabilities; and safety engineer Allison Bailey — will provide a panel discussion for the high-school girls. Nissan’s Susan Arrington and Carlene Brown-Judkins will conduct a paper-airplane workshop for the middle-school girls, and Janet Bryan and Paige Mitchell will combine for “Heels and Wheels,” showing them how to build the floor of a vehicle.
Many volunteers will make the day go smoothly, Iriarte-Gross said.
Event sponsors include the College of Basic and Applied Sciences and its nine departments, the MTSU president’s and provost’s offices, the American Association of University Women’s Murfreesboro chapter, Schneider Electric; the WISTEM Center and the Nashville Section of the American Chemical Society.
For information, call 615-904-8253, e-mail jiriarte@mtsu.edu or visit www.mtsu.edu/eyh.

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Founded in 1911, Middle Tennessee State University is a Tennessee Board of Regents institution located in Murfreesboro and is the state’s largest public undergraduate institution. MTSU now boasts one of the nation’s first master’s degree programs in horse science, and the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington, D.C., acclaims MTSU’s Master of Science in Professional Science degree—the only one in Tennessee—as a model program. This fall, MTSU unveiled three new doctoral degrees in the sciences.

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