Get to know professions without gender stereotypes! The Future Day 2023 at TU Braunschweig

How do I find the right profession for me? What opportunities are open to me? What exactly can you do at a university? These are questions that young pupils ask themselves during their career orientation. On 27 April, numerous children and adolescents gained exciting insights into various fields of study and work. Every year, the nationwide campaign day “Girls’/Boys’Day” sets itself the task of breaking through gender-specific thinking in order to encourage girls and boys in their career choice – far away from stereotypical images of gender roles. The focus is on showing professions in which the respective gender is underrepresented.

With a total of 480 participants at around 40 institutes and institutions, it was the largest programme our university has offered to date. A broad and varied programme was put together for the participating pupils. In the Cluster of Excellence SE²A – Sustainable and Energy-Efficient Aviation, the girls learned about aircraft engines and flight simulators. They also conducted their own experiments in a wind tunnel and gained an insight into the experimental work of the Institute for Fluid Mechanics.

Exciting insights

For the boys, there were, among other things, exciting insights into the production of medicines at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmaceutics. At the Institute for German Studies, the 5th to 7th grade pupils were allowed to experiment with literature and media in the literature lab. In this way, they learned more about the profession of literary scholars and discovered that it is not only about reading. At the Institute for Educational Sciences, the pupils created a questionnaire and conducted surveys with students, such as “How does one become a good teacher?”. In the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences, boys and girls from grades 8 to 10 competed together in small groups in a bridge-building challenge. The goal was to build bridges out of paper that would impress in terms of load-bearing capacity, resource conservation and design. A good combination of an offer from two degree programmes, one of which has a high proportion of men and the other of which has a high proportion of women.

A total of 315 girls and 160 boys from school years 5 to 10 took part in the Future Day 2023 at TU Braunschweig. The children and adolescents of different age groups were given the opportunity to get to know new professions and thus broaden the still strongly gender-specific spectrum of their career choice.

The “Girls’/Boys’Day” has taken place annually since 2001 as a nationwide day of action and supports the “Initiative Klischeefrei”. The initiative advocates gender-sensitive career orientation and is managed by the Federal Coordination Office. At TU Braunschweig, the Future Day is organised by the Equal Opportunity Office in cooperation with the central facilities and institutes.

We captured some impressions of the Future Day 2023 in pictures:

Experiment on the analysis of a drug with UV/VIS spectroscopy at the Institute of Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Photo credit: Ahmed Nassef/TU Braunschweig

In total, about 65 pupils took part in the offers of the institutes of the Cluster of Excellence Sustainable and Energy Efficient Aviation Systems (SE²A) and the Lower Saxony Research Centre for Aviation (NFL). Photo credit: Max Fuhrmann/TU Braunschweig

Library rally at the Institute of German Studies. Photo credit: Kristina Rottig/TU Braunschweig

Making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. The students were shown how to make ice cream within minutes by stirring in -200 °C cold liquid nitrogen with lots of steam. Photo credit: Kristina Rottig/TU Braunschweig

Making music together made easy! At the Institute for Music and Music Education, the pupils rehearsed a song together. Photo credit: Kristina Rottig/TU Braunschweig

At the Institute for Building Climatology and Energy of Architecture, the pupils learned about building materials for thermally activated clay walls. Photo credit: Kristina Rottig/TU Braunschweig

Using a practical example, the pupils at the Institute for Building Materials, Concrete Construction and Fire Safety learn how to construct with CAD software. The CAD model is used to generate data for 3D printing. Photo credit: Ahmed Nassef/TU Braunschweig

At the BLB, the process steps for the production of lithium-ion batteries were explained and demonstrated to the pupils using practical experiments as part of the Future Day. The photo shows an example of the experiment on manual electrolyte filling of pouch cells in the BLB laboratory. Photo credit: Ahmed Nassef/TU Braunschweig

At the Institute of Aircraft Design and Lightweight Structures (IFL), the pupils learned how to use craft materials to protect a fragile egg as a small "passenger" from an impact. Photo credit: Max Fuhrmann/TU Braunschweig

Demonstration of a Tesla coil in the high-voltage hall of elenia. Photo credit: Kristina Rottig/TU Braunschweig