Stanford celebrates Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day
Ralene Parker, daughter of university employee Benita Givens, savored the results of her venture in ice-cream making in one of last Thursday’s workshops.
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
About 300 guest students, ranging in age from 10 to 15, got a taste of a typical day at Stanford by participating in more than two dozen workshops hosted by offices and departments across campus Thursday for Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. A sampling of the 25 different sessions included virtual laparoscopic surgery, chemistry magic and a morning with a student athlete.
But perhaps the workshop that participants savored most was one hosted by Land and Buildings called "Extreme 'Edible' Home Makeover." After the department's staff lectured on landscaping and architecture in their offices at 655 Serra St., the 16 youngsters were ushered into a conference room where bare cookie-bread houses were waiting to be decorated.
The materials they had to work with: M&Ms, chocolate squares, jellybeans, pretzels and several types of sugary cereals, which they stuck to their homes with bright and tasty icing. Driveways were paved with raw lasagna pasta, while lawns and gardens consisted of Indian herbs from the cupboard of a Land and Buildings staffer. Two of her colleagues had baked the cookie-bread houses the previous weekend.
Students were placed in workshops according to ranked preferences that were stated on their applications. The half-day event, held at Stanford since 1996, is co-sponsored by the WorkLife Office and Human Resources and is coordinated largely by Carole Skladany and Denise Bebb, administrators in the WorkLife Office.
For the second year in a row, the university has opened up its celebration to a small group of girls from an after-school program in San Francisco. Skladany said the program first approached the WorkLife Office about being able to participate in last year's event. "We were thrilled to have them be able to come because they may not have been able to experience something like this before," Skladany said. "It went really well."
Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day has evolved since the New York City-based Ms. Foundation for Women introduced the program in 1993. It started with local companies being encouraged to have employees bring their daughters to work on the last Thursday in April; boys eventually were added to the bill.
The Ms. Foundation has announced that this is the last year it will serve as the tradition's official sponsor, explaining that workplaces around the country have taken ownership of the day and that it's time for the organization to get behind other causes. More than 3 million employers and an estimated 35 million Americans were expected to participate this year.
At Stanford, the day kicked off in Dinkelspiel Auditorium, where Reggie Johnson, a senior analyst in the Benefits Department, fired up the children to yell out this year's theme: "Revolutionizing the Workplace." Stanford student groups juggled, danced hip-hop and performed improvisational skits. Preceding all that was a welcome by Randy Livingston, Stanford's vice president for business affairs and chief financial officer.
"One of the great things about careers is you don't necessarily have to stick to one thing," said Livingston, who shared some of his professional experiences before Stanford, such as working for Apple Computer. "At various times, you can move on to different things, and that's part of what makes it interesting."
Interesting indeed. For their session, an older group of guest students were whisked up to the second floor of the Medical School Office Building, home to the Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies (SUMMIT) office lab. Director Parvati Dev was just wrapping up an international video conference—a colleague in Pakistan was participating in the dead of night—when the dozen students arrived for "Move Over X-Box—Virtual Surgeries are Here."
They formed several small groups, and one sat down in front of a cluster of laptops for an exercise similar to popular online role-playing games. At SUMMIT, the students walked through a virtual world that mirrors the corridors of Stanford Hospital's emergency room. One student played a doctor, another was an administrator, while a third was an emergency medical technician scrambling to get someone's attention.
"It's a medical management issue, and it's an emergency issue," Dev explained. Leading the various groups were mechanical engineer Robert Cheng, chemist and 3-D image expert Craig Cornelius and Dr. LeRoy Heinrichs, former chair of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department and current head of SUMMIT's surgical simulation unit.
"Are you cut out to be a surgeon?" asked a flier above a laparoscopic surgery simulator, where students zapped glowing orbs of tissue on a computer screen using controls with triggers that mimic the instruments used in real minimally invasive surgeries. Foot pedals below controlled cauterizing, while the students looked up at the screen that showed internal organs, fatty ducts and the occasional slipup in all its gory detail.
"In surgery we say, 'You can't say Oops!'" Heinrichs told a student who repeatedly poked his probe into perfectly healthy tissue. "Oops, there goes that word again."
Meanwhile, getting more giggles out of science was a bigger group of youngsters in a workshop called "Chemistry Magic Show." Undergrads who are members of the campus Chemistry Club stood at the front of a laboratory in the Mudd Chemistry Building dropping flowers, fruits and rubber balls into a container full of smoking liquid nitrogen. Using tongs, the chemistry students retrieved the items from the sub-zero pool and then dropped them on the floor.
The flowers shattered like glass, an orange cracked like an egg and a banana broke in half—at which point, Ed Caron, an administrative manager in Chemistry Operations whose child was in the workshop, exclaimed: "A banana split!"
But perhaps the kid that most found his niche was Andrew Pollack. Son of Jon Pollack, assistant professor of pathology, 10-year-old Andrew sat in front of an elaborate log cabin at the end of the Land and Buildings workshop. While entire walls of other cookie-bread houses in the conference room remained bare—or had just a thin coat of icing slathered on—Andrew's walls were completely covered with hundreds of pretzel sticks. The roof was studded with Fruit Loops and the windows were trimmed with chocolate.
"I like the look of log cabins, so I thought I'd use pretzels," said Andrew, reaching for another Cocoa Puff and casually popping it into his mouth. "It just came to me."