The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) recognized three Cal Poly CENG faculty members as award recipients for their contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in STEM.
Among the recipients are General Engineering Program Director Lizabeth Thompson, CENG Dean Amy S. Fleischer and Cal Poly’s Women’s Engineering Program (WEP) Director Helene Finger.
The award ceremony will take place at WE23, a SWE-led conference for women in engineering and technology meant to empower attendees to network, advance their careers and think innovatively. The conference will last from Oct. 26-28 in Los Angeles.
Lizabeth Thompson, PhD, PE
In 1977, Lizabeth Thompson took an engineering class while obtaining her bachelor’s in industrial engineering at Cal Poly. In order to “keep everyone awake,” her professor inserted pictures of girls in bathing suits throughout his slideshow, making Thompson incredibly uncomfortable.
“At that moment, I was like, ‘Well, that doesn’t really keep me awake.’ Or, it actually probably does because I was so like, ‘What?’” Thompson said.
Thompson now serves as the General Engineering Program Director at the very same institution she was prejudiced at and, as of this year, is one of two nationwide recipients of the Distinguished Engineering Educator Award, which she will accept at WE23.
“In the Barbie movie they say, ‘Thank you for this award. I worked really hard and I deserve it!’ Part of me wants to say that,” Thompson said. “But part of me wants to also just say I’m really humbled, because I’m just one person doing my job. There’s so many people like all the staff and students who have contributed that could be recognized.”
In addition to her role as program director, Thompson also teaches industrial engineering on campus, where she designs her classroom to be welcoming and inclusive. According to Thompson, her feminist approach to teaching means collaboration and a sense of community within a field that is predominantly competitive.
“The water we swim in is individual effort and competition and this idea that if you’re going to be a good engineer, what you need to do is work really hard and get really stressed out,” Thompson said. “I think that over time, we’ve realized that’s not exactly the right way to make a good engineer.”
Thompson continues to actively change this socialization and promote diversity in engineering at Cal Poly through four different grants provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Using these grants, Thompson has raised $9.8 million since 2011, according to a Cal Poly news release about the SWE award recipients.
One of the grants is called ENGAGE, a mentorship program with Allan Hancock College and Cuesta College for engineering or computer science majors. It specifically aims to retain underrepresented transfers from these colleges, primarily Hispanic and Latino students, who historically drop the major two years after starting it, according to a CENG news release.
“The idea is to better connect with local people who want to come to Cal Poly,” Thompson said. “And at the institutional level, we’re really looking at how easy it is for transfer students to come here and feel welcome and feel integrated.”
Not only does Thompson strive to highlight unheard voices within the program she directs, but she also advises Engineers Without Borders, where engineering students work on international projects. She hears critiques of the club that pin its members as “white saviors,” and hopes to deconstruct them in a way that acknowledges the club’s white positionality productively. Thompson emphasizes that activism begins with conversation, especially when it comes to women in STEM.
“We need to keep naming it over and over and over again,” Thompson said in reference to underrepresented groups in engineering. “Like, you don’t need to giggle after you say something important. Over and over again, just keep saying, ‘It’s not you. It’s the system.’”
Amy S. Fleischer, PhD, ME, MSME
Amy S. Fleischer is beginning her sixth academic year as CENG Dean as she accepts the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Program Award by SWE, the only one of its kind in the nation.
“I’m humbled and appreciative of the award,” Fleischer said. “And yet, I still see there’s so much work to do.”
Before coming to Cal Poly in July 2018, Fleischer was Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University, her alma mater, a position which she was elected for by colleagues who were previously her professors. Before being elected, she also became the first full female professor at Villanova’s College of Engineering in 2012, a feat that should not necessarily be a source of pride for the university, Fleischer noted.
Despite becoming comfortable navigating the male-dominated field of mechanical engineering, Fleischer said it was out of necessity, not want. She said she pushes to create a better working environment for incoming generations of engineers.
“It shouldn’t be a question of how women and people of color adapt to the dominant culture, but how the dominant culture adapts to be more inclusive,” Fleischer said. “So that more people can come in and participate and different voices get heard.”
Fleischer and the rest of the engineering faculty recently implemented the 2023-28 CENG Strategic Plan, which focuses on DEI and aims to create a communal spirit within the field of engineering at Cal Poly.
One of the strategies in the plan was to incorporate creativity into engineering through starting the Art of Engineering Challenge, which invites CENG students and faculty to submit visual artifacts that bring art and engineering together. The selected submissions get displayed throughout common engineering spaces and labs, working to create a better sense of belonging in these areas.
“If you go into a space and it feels like you don’t belong there, you don’t see that space reflecting you, then you’re much less likely to stay engaged in what’s going on,” Fleischer said.
Letting students know that they are meant to be on Cal Poly’s campus encourages them to stay in the program and retain the diversity efforts of both CENG and Strategic Enrollment Management, Fleischer said.
“Each one of our Cal Poly students belongs here,” Fleischer said. “We offered them all admission, we’ve chosen them, they’ve chosen us, and now we’re together as a group. And we all belong.”
Hispanic, Latino and women first-year enrollment numbers within CENG have increased under the leadership of Fleischer, according to the news release about the award recipients. The engineering program targets outreach towards underrepresented students, which centered Hispanic and Latina women interested in the program this school year, Fleischer said.
Another aspect of the Strategic Plan is concerned with diversifying CENG faculty. The CENG Inclusive Hiring Guidelines were implemented when Fleischer came in as CENG Dean. It includes rewriting job advertisements to appeal to a wide variety of backgrounds and asking interview questions that push faculty to incorporate DEI into their research and educational values, Fleischer says.
“It came from the bottom up – from the students, from the faculty, from the staff – they want diversity, equity, inclusion and for changing our culture to be a key part of our strategic plan,” Fleischer said.
More recently, Flesicher and her team also incentivized new faculty to advance justice, diversity, equity and inclusion by providing them the opportunity to receive up to $10,000 after speaking with the Associate Dean for Diversity and Student Success about improving their DEI strategy.
Fleischer continues to emphasize diversity throughout all facets of CENG, especially with the upcoming quarter to semester conversion for the 2026-27 academic school year. The conversion gives her team a chance to embed curriculum threads throughout all 735 classes under CENG, which will highlight the significance of multicultural perspectives on engineering.
“What I really believe is that if you work to make positive change in your little corner of the world, and everybody else also works to make positive change in their little corner of the world, then eventually the world becomes a better place for it,” Fleischer said.
Helene Finger, PE, F.ASCE, F.SWE
Helene Finger obtained her civil engineering bachelor’s degree at Cal Poly in 1988. After working for PG&E for seven years, she had a child and decided to put her name on the ASI Children’s Center list, even though she thought she’d be a stay-at-home mom. When she got in, she was able to start her master’s program in civil and environmental engineering, a department she ended up becoming a lecturer for.
Now, Finger is entering her 26th academic school year as Cal Poly’s Women’s Engineering Program Director, a program directly coinciding with the Cal Poly chapter of SWE. As a result, she has been recognized nationally as a SWE fellow, an honor bestowed to only three other recipients nationwide.
“SWE has really been instrumental on this campus in promoting women of all intersectional identities, and to be recognized by this organization at a national level is just an honor of what’s been accomplished here,” Finger said.
During her career at Cal Poly, Finger has done PhD work in mechanical engineering at UCSB and returned back to PG&E for work on the Diablo Canyon power plant near Avila Beach and consulting for tsunami reanalysis after Fukushima. Finger has also advised the Cal Poly SWE chapter since 2000.
“I think the thing that’s most important is to not think that you’re going to have this linear career. Like, you just need to stay open to what presents itself,” Finger said. “Because you never know what doors might open.”
The Women’s Engineering Program began in 1987 under former CENG Dean Peter Lee as a way to get women’s enrollment in the program up, which Finger accomplished. It has since become a student-run organization that focuses more on making sure the demographics of the program match those of the rest of the state of California, Finger says.
Finger recently partnered with Associate Dean for Student Success Camille O’Bryant to form a community for Black women in STEM, which creates space for conversations about things such as the severe lack of Black representation at Cal Poly in general.
“It’s not this big, huge epiphany,” Finger said. “It’s just the sum of conversations that are supportive to our students that really matter.”
WEP and SWE outreach programs are now also targeting low income K-12 schools that don’t have many extracurricular STEM opportunities. For instance, the SWEeties program has SWE officers reach out to high schools in their local community to hopefully get in touch with first-generation students whose parents haven’t gone to college, Finger said.
Courtesy |Aiden Harper
Finger also mentors and talks to students one-on-one herself, on her own volition. From SWE officers to students in the WEP study space, she tries to be friendly so that individuals aren’t intimidated by her status as a faculty member.
“I mean, [students] keep me current on so many concepts,” Finger said. “It’s easy to continue thinking a certain way while the world is changing. A lot of times the students need to realize they’re the ones who make the change.”
Finger continues to have these conversations, as she believes having a diverse engineering community yields solutions to the most critical problems within our society.
“When you don’t know it, or you don’t see it, you just don’t know,” Finger said. “If you’re not including stuff that is important for women or stuff that is important for Hispanic communities or African American communities, because none of them are in your design team, then you’re not really developing the most important solutions.”
Editor’s Note: This story was originally featured in the Oct. 2023 print issue of Mustang News. To view the full copy, visit Mustang News on Issuu.