Girls are smart, too

— “Girls are smart,” Kaylin Brouhard said.

“Girls are some of the smartest people on earth,” Tina Cotton said.

Brouhard, Cotton and Melanie Beehler are three eight-grade students from Pea Ridge Middle School who attended the Girls of Promise event Saturday at NWACC.

Beehler wants a career in medicine. Cotton wants to be a pharmacist. Brouhard wants to be a math teacher and basketball coach.

All three said the event was fun and different andthey were able to learn more about fields they hadn’t researched.

Middle school counselor Cathy Caudle said several girls qualified to attend the event designed to expose the young ladies to possibilities in the math and science fields.

The rumor that math is hard was made up by boys to keep girls out of math-based-jobs such as engineering, said the keynote speaker for a Girls of Promise event Saturday.

Karenann Terrell, Walmart’s executive vice president and chief information officer, told the crowd of eighth-grade girls the only thing between them and success are choices.

“The best way to predict the future is to prepare for it,” Terrell told the girls. “It all comes down to the choices you make.”

More than 100 girls from Northwest Arkansas attended the event held by the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas.

The girls spent the day engaging with professionals who work in the fields of science, technology, engineering or math - the focus of the event.

Editor’s note: Teresa Moss, tmoss@nwaonline.

com, contributed information to this story.

News, Pages 8 on 03/07/2012