Expanding Your Horizons Network, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd. Oakland, CA 94613 phone: (510) 430.2222 fax: (510) 430.2090 www.expandingyourhorizons.org

The Conference Year in Review by Stacey Roberts-Ohr, Executive Director

This past year we were busy holding conferences or planning to hold them. I spent a good part of my time helping others start EYH conferences. I went to Kalispell, Montana, to help get a conference started. I attended a planning meeting at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I also went to Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to meet with a planning committee. All of the sites I visited followed through and have already held their EYH events. We also welcomed a conference in Derry, Northern Ireland, which was co-sponsored by Seagate Technology and Lumen Christi College.

When I wasn’t helping new conferences get started, I was visiting conferences and observing their terrific hands-on workshops. This year I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the ten-year anniversary of the EYH at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I also visited the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana and helped them celebrate their ten-year EYH.

In March, I hopped on a plane and took a very long flight to Malaysia. Seagate Technology (our largest corporate donor) has a facility in Penang and while there I met with Seagate employees from their China, Singapore, Thailand and Penang offices. All of these dedicated employees care passionately about increasing the number of women who work in hi-tech, especially in computing, and all agreed to try to host EYH conferences in their respective countries. The Malaysia EYH was held in July and

The first EYH in Asia was held in July in Penang, Malaysia

Thailand and Singapore’s EYH’s will follow closely.

I also saw some really great and engaging hands-on work-shops this year. It’s hard to name them all since so many of them were so good. Some of my favorite workshops: “Lego Robots” (Tri-Valley EYH), “The Science of Making Torti-llas” (Skyline EYH), “Bending, Bouncing and Color Mixing: Play with Light” (San Jose EYH), and “Glitter Girls” (Middle Tennessee State University EYH). I noticed

Girls enjoy hands-on activities at our first EYH conference in Malaysia

1

Parents Speak

“Thank you very much for continuing these conferences for our daughters.”

an interesting trend this year. While most conferences still have keynote speakers, some have chosen to end this practice. They think the young women do not benefit from hearing keynote addresses because the girls get easily bored. Since I see so many conferences, I am inclined to agree. However, one conference that has really great keynote addresses is the San Francisco State University EYH. Each year they find an interesting role model/keynote speaker to inspire their conference participants. This year was no exception; their keynote was given by Cathy Valentino of Houghton Mifflin. During her talk, the girls were asked to take out several items from their confer-ence bags to manipulate. It was a great interactive session and all the girls were engaged. Other keynote speakers included the Dean of the School of

Business Administration at San Diego State University, a former mayor, and a biochemist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Cali-fornia. The Cornell EYH in Ithaca, New York featured a local doctor of veterinary medicine who has a specialized prac-tice working with dairy cattle and small animals.

Another trend I am noticing is that EYH conferences seem to be getting bigger! Skyline College in San Mateo, California had 1,077 girls in grades 6 to 12. This is definitely one of our largest conferences. The Tyler, Texas EYH welcomed 643 young women and the San Joaquin EYH in Stockton, California hosted 510 cheerful young ladies. This year many conference coordinators told me that their student participation increased dramatically.

2

EYH 2006-2007 Conference Statistics81 Active Conferences Attendees Average/Conference %

Total Students 26,840 336

- Elementary School :3rd-5th 570 6 2%

- Middle School :6th-8th 23,325 292 87%

- High School:9th-12th 3,005 38 11%

Minority Students 10,000 142 37%

Registered Adults 3,705 49

Role Models 4,715 51

Committee Members 888 12

Total Program Participants 36,148 448

2007 Student Workshop Titles

The Good, The Bad, and the Smelly (Chemistry)

How to Mend a Broken Heart (Medicine)

Elhalumps and Wuzzles (Ocular diseases)

Root Beer, Cheese and a Kiss (Biotechnology)

Smart Girls, Fast Cars (Physical Science)

Bridging the Gap, Make It ‘n’ Break It(Civil Engineering)

Sample Conference ScheduleWelcome/Registration

Keynote Address

Hands-on Workshop One

Break

Hands-on Workshop Two

Lunch

Hands-on Workshop Three

Closing Session/Goodbye

8:30 a.m.

9:00 a.m.

9:45 a.m.

11:00 a.m.

11:15 a.m.

12:20 p.m.

1:20 p.m.

2:25 p.m.

2007 Adult Workshops Titles

Parenting Teenage Girls

Disaster Preparedness: Is your Family Ready?

The Not So Simple Life: Body Image and the Decline of Self-Esteem

A Review of 2007 EYH WorkshopsHere’s a sampling of some wonderful workshops titles:

3

Our NumbersTotal number of EYH sites: 75

Number of countries hosting EYH conferences: 3

Largest number of girls at an EYH: 1,077 - Skyline College, San Bruno, CA

Average fee to attend an EYH conference: $9.50

Average cost to organize an EYH conference: $8,624

EYH Network Honors Our Corporate Partners!

One of the most inspiring things that has happened this year has been the Network’s ability to benefit from the direct involvement of two of our largest corporate partners. In particular, I want to mention the ongoing efforts of Seagate Technology (www.seagate.com) and of Google, Inc. Every day we are seeing how these partnerships directly benefit us. Let me share one example of how their involvement is helping us succeed.

Our partnership with Seagate Technology is about to start its third year and continues to thrive. We have just received another year of generous financial support, but monetary support is only one way we have benefited from this fruitful partnership.

In April, I went to Seagate Technology in Pitts-burgh, PA where they have research and develop-ment facilities. Seagate is co-sponsor of a new EYH

conference at Robert Morris University to be held in the fall.I went to the university to help facilitate planning. During the orientation, I was demonstrating our on-line registration data-base. During my demonstration it became apparent that a few key elements were not working correctly.

After the meeting, I was talking to Mike Pesta, Senior Manager of Information Tech-nology at Seagate, and I indi-cated how frustrated I was that we could not get the database to work properly. I then mentioned that the volunteer who had been working on the database was no longer available to assist us in fixing it. Unsolicited, Mike volun-teered to look at the database to try to fix some of the problems.

Two days later, he called me with the name of an employee he assigned to help us. I spent two days with this person in Pittsburgh fixing the database problems and now he is also helping us develop another database that will help us keep

Seagate Technology’s plant in Derry, Northern Ireland

Seagate Technology is the world’s highest volume manufacturer of magnetic recording heads for the digital storage market

4

better track of our 70-plus conference sites. I’m pretty sure that Mike didn’t know what he was getting himself into and how eager we would be to take him up on his offer to help; but even when he found out, he didn’t back down, nor did Keith Weightman, the employee who has been helping us. And, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the ongoing support of two other important individ-uals at Seagate: Elena Sexton in their Corporate Communications department and the President and Chief Operating Officer of Seagate, Dave Wickersham. This outstanding support by Seagate is allowing us to professionalize our services, and their employees understand how much of a differ-ence their support is making. Seagate has done a great job creating a model program that success-fully integrates financial support with volunteer support. Dave Wickersham (also an EYH Board member) is sending a strong message about the importance of employee involvement.

Our conferences help introduce girls to other girls who share their interest in math and science

The Middle Tennessee State University EYH showcases some of its happy participants

Girls Speak

“It was a great experi-ence going to each workshop. It broadened my mind about careers in the future.”

“I loved this! I’ll be back next year.”

“You guys rocked!”

5

Since 1976, 726,000 young

women have at tended

EYH Conferences

Seagate Technology isn’t the only corporation that is stepping up to the plate. We’ve also been able to ask Google for help on several ongoing projects. Like Seagate, Google is not only helping us financially, they are helping by providing employee support. At Google each employee can devote 20% of their time to working on any project of their choosing. I went to Google to present the Network and asked several of their employees to assist on some ongoing projects and they agreed. Google employees are re-designing the entire EYH Web site, which is a huge task. When completed, the new Web site will have a new, more modern look. It will also be designed so it’s easier to find pertinent information. Another team from Google is analyzing our Web site traffic, and through a generous Adwords program grant, they have helped us increase our daily traffic to over 2,000 hits a day. This increase in traffic is great because now more and more people can find out about the important work that we do. This same team has helped us increase our individual donations through our Web site and analyzed other ways our Web site might help us increase our yearly revenue.

Google has also just given us a grant to increase the number of EYH conferences internationally, and we hope Google employees from around the world will agree to lead hands-on workshops and serve as committee volunteers.

We are fortunate to have a fantastic project manager from Google, Janet Traub, who is master-fully coordinating all of the Google project teams. Also, since our work on the Web site redesign will eventually coordinate with the national registration

Save the Date November 14, 2007Join us this November 14th at the

Googleplex (Google Headquarters)

in Mountain View, California, for

an exciting evening to support the

Expanding Your Horizons Network.

Enjoy cocktails, hors d’oeuvres

and live music. Take a tour. Dine at

the famous Google cafe.

For more information on this

evening event, please check our

Web site at:

www.expandingyourhorizons.org or

contact our office at: 510.430.2222.

These EYH girls learn to listen to the heartbeat of a mouse

6

database, Janet is now directly interfacing with the Seagate volunteers in Pittsburgh. Janet even accompanied me to Pitts-burgh to meet some of the Seagate volunteers and to help move the project forward. Talk about a committed volunteer!

Professionally, it’s been wonderful collaborating with so many bright and motivated volunteers. I hope that more companies eventually decide to create programs that combine cash donations with volunteer support. It’s the way to go!

Our dedicated workshop leaders are experts at engaging our students

Girls Speak

“I have been coming here since 6th grade in 2004. It is great! I will definitely be coming back my next 3 years of high school!”

This EYH workshop is preparing tomorrow’s chemists

7

Parents Speak

“This was so much more than I had expected [my child] to get out of this program. I have been trying to steer [my child] into an educa-tion in engineering and this weekend was a tremendous success to that end.”- Parent from 2007 Rochester Institute of Technology EYH

At this Expanding Your Horizons confer-ence, middle and high-school girls learn how to build and pilot underwater robots

Happy Anniversary

We sure are getting old! This year many EYH conferences celebrated big anniversaries.

Happy Birthday to: Mills College 31 Years

University of Arizona 25 Years

Sonoma State University 15 Years

San Jose State University 15 Years

Houston EYH (The Rice School)15 Years

University of Notre Dame 10 Years

Middle Tennessee State University 10 Years

Expansion ProgramIn last year’s annual report, I mentioned that the Network had begun to offer EYH confer-ence sites the opportunity to extend their program from a one-day program to something longer.

To help sites do this, we offered up to $4,000 in seed money that would allow sites to hire a part-time program coordinator, and even pay a small amount toward program supplies.

This year we were able to once again offer expansion grants to EYH sites, and we’ve selected Oregon Institute of Technology EYH as a new program to fund. Their students will participate in a series of science sleepovers. In addition, we will continue funding the programs at Tyler, Texas EYH (a week-long hot air balloon camp) and the U.C. Santa Cruz EYH (a school-based program to introduce students to our conferences and hands-on science activities). At least one or two additional sites will be funded in the upcoming months.

8

Your EYH Update-A Story About Leadershipby Stacey Roberts-Ohr, Executive Director

I would like to introduce you to an amazing young woman by the name of Connie Ip, an 11th-grader at Skyline High School in Oakland, California. Connie began her association with EYH several years ago when she attended the Mills College EYH conference. She then participated in our EYH Ambassador Program, a program designed to develop leadership skills and help girls recruit their peers to upcoming conferences. This past year, Connie started volunteering at the Mills College EYH. Several months ago, Connie contacted the national office and asked if we would once again have an EYH Ambassador program. She fondly recalled her days as an ambassador and wanted other girls to have similar experiences. I explained to Connie that we had no upcoming plans to sponsor an Ambas-sador program, and that if we wanted to hold one we would have to go after targeted funding.

Connie then asked if she could write a youth-initiated proposal to fund a program she was inter-ested in creating, a program which would be based on the Ambassador program model. I was really

surprised and, truthfully, I didn’t think that she would have the time or knowledge to pursue proposal writing. Not wanting to discourage her, I told her that I would work with her, but that she would have to contact me again in a few weeks since I would be traveling for EYH. A few weeks passed and, lo and behold, Connie contacted me again and asked to come in and see me. When she arrived she presented me with an entire list of organi-zations that fund youth-initiated programs and she had already started filling out an application that was going to be due soon. Super impressive!

Since our initial meeting, Connie has applied for $5,500 in funding. Each week we meet to discuss potential funders and Connie works on the grant appli-cations. She’s really organized and never tardy. It is hard for me

Connie Ip, a 11th grader who has made a real impact on the EYH program

Chemistry experiment performed at the 2006 Mills Colllege EYH

9

Expanding Your Horizons Board Members 2006-2007Carol Langbort, President (Professor, San Francisco State University)

Teri Perl, Past President (Retired, Founder of The Learning Company)

Melissa Koch, Vice President(SRI International)

Peg McPartland, Vice President(Retired, Golden Gate University)

Rachel Sheinbein, Vice President (Consultant)

Tania Madfes, Treasurer (Retired, West Ed)

T.K. Subramanian, Secretary(Retired, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Susan Brown (KDH Systems)

Aileen DeSoto (Graduate Student, U.C. Berkeley)

Cherrill Spencer(Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)

Kimberly Tanner(Professor, San Francisco State University)

Dave Wickersham(President and COO, Seagate Technology)

StaffStacey Roberts-Ohr, Executive DirectorRobin Rederford, Administrative Assistant

to remember that Connie is just a high school student. I like to think that our EYH Ambassador program inspired Connie and helped her develop confidence and strong leadership skills. I’m seeing these skills each time we interact.

Connie wants all middle school girls to have the same experi-ence she did and to help them learn about careers in science, technology, engineering and math-ematics. She also wants them to participate in engaging hands-on activities. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope that Connie’s program ideas get funded.

Our MissionOur mission is to encourage young women to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers. Through Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) Network programs, we provide STEM role models and hands-on activities for middle and high school girls. Our ultimate goal is to motivate girls to become innovative and creative thinkers ready to meet 21st Century challenges.

Girls learn about botany at this EYH

10

Average number

o f at tendees per

EYH i s up 15%

from last year.

Expanding Your Horizons Network, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd. Oakland, CA 94613 phone: (510) 430.2222 fax: (510) 430.2090 www.expandingyourhorizons.org

7