Monday,  September 3, 2012 • Vol. 13--No. 050 • 24 of 39 •  Other Editions

(Continued from page 23)

Number of SD women engineering students rising

• RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) -- Recruiting efforts and financial aid are helping to draw more South Dakota women students into studying mechanical engineering.
• Forty-one women are enrolled in the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology mechanical engineering program this month. Five years ago, there were 23 women in the program.
• The school has advertising aimed at women, and female students can get scholarships worth up to $5,000 a year.
• Recruiting official Lisa Carlson tells the Rapid City Journal (http:// bit.ly/OMSioC) the school is starting a mentoring program to match new female mechanical engi

neering students with women who are further along in school.
• Lyndsey Penfield says she wants to be a mentor to new women students. She says she got into the field because of her interest in airplanes, and she's graduating next year.
•

AP News in Brief
On the beleaguered Gulf Coast, another catastrophe makes for the perfect political backdrop

• NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Mitt Romney wasted no time after accepting the GOP presidential nomination in heading to Louisiana to see the damage from Hurricane Isaac, changing his schedule on the fly to get there the very next day. President Barack Obama also tweaked his travel plans to make sure he gets there Monday, ahead of his own nominating convention.
• This for a Category 1 storm that killed seven and swamped low-lying areas of Louisiana and dumped more than a foot of rain on its way north -- a disaster, to be sure, but one that will never rival the biggest to hit the Gulf Coast.
• In a region with a storied culture and a history of human suffering, natural and manmade catastrophes, and struggles with government ineptitude and indifference, it's just another turn in front of the cameras as the perfect political backdrop.
• Call it the Katrina effect: Presidents, and would-be presidents, can't afford to get panned like George W. Bush did in the days after Hurricane Katrina crippled New Orleans and the Mississippi and Alabama coasts in 2005, killing more than 1,800.
• Bush's decision to observe Katrina's flooding of New Orleans first in a flyover in

(Continued on page 25)

© 2012 Groton Daily Independent • To send correspondence, click here.