As a sick child suffering from severe asthma, Indian national Tvisha Gangwani says her parents never pressured her to focus on academics. She got by with average grades — except in math and science, where she excelled.
One math teacher, who became her mentor, saw Gangwani’s potential and encouraged her to pursue science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM fields. She followed this advice and enrolled at the University of Southern California, where she is now pursuing a bachelor’s in electrical engineering with a minor in math. Gangwani is among the growing number of female international students pursuing STEM degrees at American universities.
[Discover these fivetips for studying STEM subjects at U.S. colleges.]
“I wanted to be a part of USC Viterbi because besides being a very good engineering school, it is known for having strong women in the engineering community. This year’s freshman engineering class is almost 40 percent female,” says Gangwani. She says the many research opportunities available to undergrads also attracted her to the school.
According to the U.S. government’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program, the total number of active female international students studying STEM in the U.S. increased more than 68 percent from 76,638 students in 2010 to 128,807 in 2015, with the largest increase at the master’s degree level. The majority of those students were from India and China.
While researching schools, Gangwani says she realized that the U.S. “had the most liberal system when it came to choosing your major.” She says she liked that she could take a variety of classes, add a minor and change her major. In contrast, in India, once students decide their area of study, they can’t make changes.
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USC isn’t the only school seeing an increase in female international students pursuing STEM. Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, dean of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, says the number of female international students at NYU has more than tripled in the last decade.
He says one reason is because the U.S. is acknowledged worldwide as a leader in higher education and stands out for its “can-do attitude, the hands-on experience that is usually incorporated in it and a culture of confidence it instills.” Some of this hands-on experience, he says, includes students working alongside entrepreneurs to learn firsthand what it takes to establish a successful company.
Japanese national Kasumi Kanetaka has enjoyed similar hands-on experience through the University of California–Davis, where she is double majoring in aerospace and mechanical engineering.
Last summer, Kanetaka completed a 10-week mechanical engineering internship at Technical University of Dresden in Germany. She says this wouldn’t have been possible if she were in Japan, since the internship program was open to college students studying STEM in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.
“Studying and getting a STEM degree in the U.S. is clearly expanding my possibility to learn more about the world,” says Kanetaka, who received the UC Davis Provost Award, a $13,250 per year renewable scholarship given to high-achieving freshmen from outside California.
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As a member of the UC Davis Advanced Modeling Aeronautics Team, she helped build a radio-controlled airplane from scratch. The team then competed in Houston for the SAE Aero Design West competition and won first overall in the advanced class category in 2014.
“Designing, planning and creating an airplane is such a good way to learn the aerospace materials from real experience,” says Kanetaka.
Through their exposure to American innovation and entrepreneurship, international students attending U.S. schools can increase their competitive edge as job applicants, says Jennifer Sinclair Curtis, dean of the UC Davis College of Engineering. She says U.S. companies, which are starting to proactively recruit those who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM, seek employees with entrepreneurial backgrounds who “are used to working in environments that are both highly competitive and evolving.”
Curtis says female international grads from U.S. universities “with both a STEM degree and some exposure to innovation or entrepreneurship will be highly sought as an employee by global companies large and small.”
International exposure as well as the prestige of American schools and research opportunities attracted Italian national Flavia Tauro to study in the U.S. Funded with a scholarship from the Italian government, she graduated in 2009 with a master’s in civil and environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2014, she also received a joint doctorate in philosophy, hydraulic engineering from the Sapienza University of Rome and mechanical engineering from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, which a U.S. professor and an Italian scholarship partially financed.
“It is an extremely enriching experience from a professional point of view. But also from a human perspective, you learn a lot in a multiethnic environment,” says Tauro, who is now assistant professor at the Department for Innovation in Biological, Agrofood and Forest Systems at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy.
Following their positive experiences studying STEM in the U.S., students like Gangwani from USC are working to recruit other female students to the primarily male-dominated field. Gangwani, who is currently in Germany for a summer internship with multinational software corporation SAP SE, started a program to host a panel for 35 girls, ages 16-17, where she discussed established women in tech, including spotlighting two of her colleagues’ careers. She plans to host similar STEM panels and workshops at her former high school in Mumbai, India, this December.
“I feel like a lot of women are afraid to take up STEM fields because they believe they won’t be successful. I want to change that,” says Gangwani, “and show them how awesome science, tech, engineering and math can be.”
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More Female International Students Pursue STEM Degrees at U.S. Universities originally appeared on usnews.com
