(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)
If you’re a female high schooler with a yen for understanding how cities work and how to help them evolve, Portland State Unviersity has a deal for you.
PSU’s Transportation Research and Education Center is offering its first-ever Summer Transportation Institute, a two-week course designed to introduce young women (rising into grades 9-12) to the possibilities of a career in shaping streets. It’ll be divided between (a) guest lectures from prominent women in Portland’s transportation world and (b) “field tours of Portland’s transportation infrastructure and public spaces.”
Here’s how the course description puts it:
The transportation work force needs all types of personalities: analytical thinkers, social movers, and creative dreamers. …
The majority of the program will be taught by women working in transportation in the academic, public and private sectors. The objective is not only to expose high school girls to academic and career opportunities in transportation but also to provide them with a narrative of the road to success from each of the professional women.
Portland provides a living laboratory for the students to experience and study multiple modes of transportation in the field. Portland is unique in the United States for its breadth of high quality transportation facilities such as the light rail, streetcar and bicycle and pedestrian network.
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The course runs from Monday, July 11 to Friday, July 21. If you’d like to see whether it might be a good fit for you, PSU has prepared a transportation quiz to help test your “transportation aptitude.” (Note: after a couple trial runs, I strongly suspect that it is not actually possible to fail this quiz.)
If that’s not enough, the program is literally administered by a rock star.
Sarah Dougher (also a singer and rock musician whose day job happens to be at PSU) said in an interview Wednesday that the school hopes to make this the first of an annual tradition.
“There are these camps all over the country,” she said. “Depending on where it takes place, it looks very different in different communities. Ours is going to have a lot on biking and walking, though not exclusively that. Also, we’re interested in thinking about social justice in relation to transportation.”
Though the official deadline for the course is May 27, Dougher said they’re being processed on a rolling basis. So it may be OK to keep applying past the deadline, but the longer you wait the more competition you’ll be facing.
“As girls become interested and apply, then we’ll get back to them once their application is complete,” Dougher said.
— Michael Andersen, (503) 333-7824 – michael@bikeportland.org
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