A recent study shows that teens are much more interested in engineering when they’re simply exposed to it.

Engineers do cool stuff. They build cities, save lives, create music and design computer systems. Plus, they make a ton of money, relatively speaking.

All these things are the stuff teen dreams are made of, and just hearing about them can help turn young students — including teenage girls — on to engineering as a college major and career option.

In an Intel-commissioned study of 1,000 teenagers, researchers found that around 63 percent of teens ages 13 to 18 had never considered a career in engineering.

But after hearing how much money engineers make ($75,000 annually, on average), around 60 percent of the subjects said they were more likely to consider engineering as a career. Learning that engineers suffer less during periods of high unemployment also went over well, persuading more than 50 percent of the teens in the study to look at engineering careers.

The majority of the teens in the study said they were also more interested in engineering “by understanding what engineers do, such as playing a role in rescuing the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010, delivering clean water to poor communities in Africa, designing the protective pads worn by athletes and constructing dams and levees that keep entire cities safe,” the study’s findings read. via Venture Beat

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