Granddaughter’s Comment Inspires Book Series About STEAM Careers

On the way home from taking her granddaughter to see Buzz Lightyear, Sheree Utash, president of WSU Tech in Wichita, asked four-year-old Ella who her favorite character had been.

After hearing it was Buzz Lightyear, Utash asked whether she wanted to become an astronaut when she grew up.

“She goes, ‘Gigi, girls can’t be astronauts,’” Utash recalled. “I stopped the car. I parked in a parking lot. I got in the back seat and started talking to her about ‘Yes. Girls can be astronauts.’ We had this long conversation. I bought her an astronaut suit for Halloween. She wore It every day for a long time.”

That encounter was the start of an idea for a book series geared for young people and designed to help spark interest in careers in STEAM, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.

“I let the idea sit back there for several years,” Utash said, until one day at an aviation event, she met Fig Factor Media founder Jackie Camacho-Ruiz, one of the nation’s few Latino sport pilots and a publisher.

Utash told her about the book idea and asked her advice on whether she should go ahead or “kick it to the curb.”
“And she said, ‘I’ll be your publisher,’” Utash said. “That’s how it all started.”

For Utash, the project is a labor of love outside her full-time role as head of the Wichita State University Campus of Applied Sciences and Technology, or WSU Tech.

For the project, Utash partnered with Mandy Fouse, WSU Tech executive director of public affairs and executive communications, to co-author the series, with the books’ characters named after Utash’s grandchildren and Fouse’s children.

Today, three of an eventual 10-book series are now available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites. They include Ella the Engineer and the Big Fix, Beckham the Biologist and the Outdoor Adventure and Paisley the Pilot and the Sky-High Day.

“We’re trying to inspire four-to-eight-year-olds about careers that they can have a curiosity and explore—that they have no frame of reference for,” Utash says. “Everybody knows what a teacher is.

Everybody knows what a nurse is. Who knows what a pilot does? Who knows what an engineer does? All these different things are STEAM careers.”

Utash read Ella the Engineer to her graddaughter’s third-grade class. That influenced the teacher to create a class science project designing a new playground on paper to upgrade the old one.

“They went to the point of drawing it, and they built it with paper and then they built it with clay,” Utash said. “It was super cool.”
What’s next?

Utash and Fouse plan to create books featuring a paramedic, data analyst, cyber and network security analyst, a graphic designer and illustrator and an economist to help with financial literacy.
“There’s a ton of titles that we can do,” Utash says.