Polytechnique Montréal’s second annual Week of the White Rose runs from November 30 to December 6, 2015. Launched last year with the mission to stimulate interest in the sciences, the event serves as a fundraiser to give young girls from disadvantaged and multiethnic backgrounds the opportunity to develop a positive attitude toward science and engineering.
During the week, Polytechnique Montréal is calling on its entire community and the general public to buy virtual white roses, the proceeds of which help fund girls’ participation in science activities, opening their eyes to the world of possibilities that science and engineering holds for them.
The first edition of the Week of the White Rose raised $25,000. These proceeds helped to:
- provide scholarships to 20 schoolgirls to attend Polytechnique’s Folie Technique science day camp.
- fund the participation of 70 girls in the camp’s Codemakers activity, where they learned more about computer programming.
- enable 1,500 elementary school girls’ participation in classroom science workshops.
- facilitate the participation of 1,000 female high school students in interactive mathematics workshops.
“Donations to the Week of the White Rose provided tangible help for [my students] to discover the world of science, realize their potential, develop interests and come into contact with the university milieu,” says Julia Laporta, an elementary school teacher in Montréal. “But most of all, they realized that all this is accessible to them, and they learned more about the various engineering sectors and about the qualifications required to become an engineer.”
Polytechnique Montréal also awarded the first Order of the White Rose last week to Tara Gholami, a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of Calgary. This $30,000 scholarship was created last year and will now be awarded annually to a Canadian female engineering student who wishes to continue her engineering studies at the master’s or doctoral level in Canada or elsewhere in the world.
