welcome to girl talk my name is regina ears and my co host carol voice an angry talk is a discussion of opportunities challenges and successes of women and girls in their daily lives girl talk can also be heard on k s k q action community radio at eighty nine point five f m sundays at noon usually we focus on women's issues but today show we will be just a girl's program the program is an s o u program advocates for women in science engineering and math the acronym is awesome also it is an annual so and tell us a bit just a bit about where you are sure my name is rachel jones i'm the director for pre college and youth programs at southern oregon university our youth program serve about five thousand students each year primarily in jackson josephine and a quick question for you rachel how did the twenty six team supposed to go can you tell us the number of people you had sure people well this was actually our twentieth annual symposium so we've been running this program for two decades and over the years we've seen a gradual increase in participants this year we had about one hundred fifty girls attending the program from one thousand nine hundred schools in three counties so how do you recruit girls girls are nominated by their teacher so we send a call for nominations out primarily to science teachers in math teachers at the middle schools and then we also notify the principals and so once a girl is nominated the school university is to advocate and improve the health of all oregonians and one of the biggest challenges we face as oregonians is the nurse that we're currently experiencing in that shortage is going to get worse so when i was asked to participate in some way mediately link to how to get young women interested in a career in and then as you start to engage with the awesome young women there did so well name program they truly are awesome they're bright and dynamic and it just really want to see how to make nursing as exciting for them in their future as it is for me in career and so it was it was just a really good fit as we possibly can fit into our life and into our schedule at this lation labs so we do us some for s o u we do other programs for us so you that are on during the summer that attract other age groups i think i focused most on middle schoolers and katie you'll have to help me out here too because this is a young women are making career choices younger and younger nowadays so we've done some other programs with older individuals and they've already put in their applications and they've already made a choice so middle schoolers to my way of thinking are my best window of opportunity to get them hooked on a career in nursing how we keep track of them we haven't done i haven't done a great job but rachel maybe we've done a little more that than i have we have recently begun more tracking of our students over time and so that we can identify if a student has participated in awesome and then some of our other youth programs that also link up with  nursing or other programs and as stephanie was saying students are looking early in earlier at identifying careers and the schools are moving towards a pathways system so by the time they enter high school they've identified a pa the across the state it was one of the guiding forces behind the development of the oregon consortium for energy one of the problems in the limitations that you have in education is that need to provide the students with the opportunities to clinically practice what you teach in them to do with live people so as much as i love simulation education one of the hopes was syndication was that we could expand and the bottom line is what really limits in rome and in our rome valley is the number of clinical placement that we have for our students now we've gotten very creative in looking at what is an effective clinical placement because one of whiz kids are supporters of awesome at the five hundred dollar level and above and we have to amazing ways kids learn when you has been an incredible champion for awesome and her granddaughters have both attended the last couple of years and then elizabeth holland who is folks will know about it will be in the spring again again we'll set the dates in the fall once we wait until the schools set their academic calendars we really value evaluation and feedback was so we actually are planning to do a survey  crease are our value for the other programs in the pre college department what might those be the things that people are most familiar with are our summer residential programs so a cademy is the one traditionally a field i think what what is starting to really there's pros and cons to everything the nursing shortage is abuse a big challenge how we're going to resolve it but the fact that there is a nursing shortage has resulted we can match and meet the diversity that's in our state and so we're really as a as a group of educators working to attract men and other diverse field of nursing so we're highly involved in academia latina highly involved in conaway and we look at how we're going to recruit and involve students we're looking at how we can make our program attractive to a broader and more population and diverse group i know diversity is difficult for us here in ashland but did you have some diversity there well we served those girls came from one thousand different schools so yeah so we had students coming from as far away as klamath falls cave junction so we had you know there are a lot of different ways to measure diversity and so we had racial diversity geographic diversity income diversity  high school completion rates and college involvement rates and so all of our programs you know we really try to provide things that are going to be stimulating for boys and encourage them to pursue higher education but because we well we try to keep the fee for awesome as low as possible so it's thirty five dollars but we do offer scholarships for some students who are would otherwise not be able to attend sometimes the schools will provide scholarships and then we work with a lot of community partners so there's the a great organization for example college dreams and they work with students in the three counties that we primarily serve and they paid for forty student provided the buses to two  the service within communities that need merican so i was wondering if it seems to be in there has been and but this to be honest this is my sixteenth year with with teaching nursing and i'm starting to think of you know the hundred sixty track on on who comes in and we were talking at a meeting i was that this last week about the challenges of tracking your graduates when they're done and they're difficult so they are university put a lot inspiring to be able to meet with other women who have succeeded in careers like that and i just want to say to any girls who are out there hoping to go into this just don't give up just keep going because if you  and michael fox and we have a couple john let's also well john let's all right lisa was here today and michael fox i don't know if you mentioned and thank you to our audience for joining us on her valley community t carolyn i hope you learned something today and will jonah join us again and remember the girl taught can be heard on t v s k q community radio eighty nine point five f m broadcasting no nonsense days so bye for now and thanks for watching girl talk on the road sally public access community television