Bee ASTRON in Dwingeloo, high tech company and member of Innovatiecluster Drachten, receives astronomer Samayra Ray fifty girls. Her message: ’’Go intern at companies so you can choose what you really like.''
,’’The most fun subject in high school was math, but I only got a 6.4 on my exam for that,’’ Jet keeps telling the girls. In other words, choose what you like. ,,After my master's degree at the University of Amsterdam, I thought, now I'm going to work and earn some money for a nice car. But that turned out differently. I was so fascinated by astronomy that I wanted to do research.”' She now does that at ASTRON, where she tries to answer the question: what remains when a star burns out? The girls listen with interest as Ray explains what her research looks like in practice. How she uses a telescope, how she looks at the sky and what she does when she finds something new. "My research so far is generating more questions than answers, but that's part of doing research!"
On their way to the radio telescope, they meet an enthusiastic group of girls. ’’Especially the doings are a lot of fun,’’ Lisa says. ''I thought it would be boring with just sitting and listening to stories, but we soldered ourselves and made things with the 3D pen!'' Mauran betrays without GirlsDay would not easily get involved with engineering. ’’I want to be a doctor, so I'm working on very different things. But I really like what I see today.''
Astronomical Clock
In the ‘wheelhouse’ of the radio telescope, once the largest in the world, Sigrid Witteveen and Ria Hermelink explain what you can do with it. They are volunteers at CAMRAS, the foundation that runs the radio telescope, and let the girls listen to a pulsar. A pulsar is the final stage of a star that spins very fast and emits electromagnetic radiation. This radiation is observed on Earth in the form of rapid pulses. These stars are also called astronomical clocks. Hermelink operates the telescope so that it spins slowly in search of a pulsar. ’’Yes, there it is.’’ We hear a kind of heartbeat, very regular. ’’This signal is very old and emitted at the time the Egyptians built their pyramids.'' What do we learn from this? Witteveen: ,,Through pulsars we learn a lot about gravity and we can find out if Einstein is right with his theory. And thanks to pulsars we can look at how spacetime moves and so we learn something again about the origins of the universe.''
female role model
Maaike and Nora are enthusiastic about GirlsDay. ,,It's best to do that more often!’’ And whether they will study engineering after today? ,,No, I'm not going to do anything in engineering,’’ Nora tells me honestly. ”’But I really like today!’ That's a win with these girls, but according to Straal, many girls and their parents still have preconceptions about engineering. "They lack female role models. Engineering is said to be boring with lots of math or whole days behind a computer screen or in a white coat in a laboratory. Today I am showing them that it is attractive and surprising.'' As an ambassador of VHTO, the initiator of GirlsDay and the national knowledge agency for more girls and women in engineering, she thinks a special girls’ day about engineering is a good thing. ’'The crazy thing is that most girls don't think about engineering for a study or career. It just doesn't occur to them. That's why you should start even earlier to show what you can do with technique. And that is more than you think, because working in technology often means learning about other cultures. ASTRON employs people of many different nationalities. That makes working here extra fun!''
GirlsDay 2018
ASTRON opened its doors in Drenthe and Photonis and VDH presented themselves at Philips in Drachten. In Fryslân BD and Philips in Drachten open to the girls. A total of 750 girls from Drenthe and Friesland attended during GirlsDay 2018 acquainted with the technology in our companies. GirlsDay is an initiative of VHTO and is held every year throughout the Netherlands. Companies and schools that want to participate next year can register via the VHTO website.