Ollick enjoys getting her hands dirty

Daisy Gibson Elementary School student Alexis Ollick rebuilds old Harley-Davidson motorcycles with her father Jason Ollick. “We take them apart and then we put them back together in more modern (ways),” she said.

Alexis Ollick, 14, also rebuilds classic cars with her uncle.

“We do the paint, the engine, the seats. Everything,” she said. Alexis Ollick also built a go-kart with her father. She is currently building her own Harley-Davidson.

“It’s a 1946, but now that I’m making it more modern, it’s going to be not as small,” she said. “It’s going to be probably the size of a new 1947, ‘48.”

The eighth-grader is a natural grease monkey.

“By the time I was 3, I was actually already under the car, fixing everything under there,” Alexis Ollick said.

The teen enjoys getting her hands dirty.

“The hands-on is really fun,” she said. “The mess is actually pretty fun, too. The new cars today, they’re more electric, but I like the actual hands-on, grease all over you, old cars.”

Alexis Ollick joined her school’s Femineers program because she wants to be an engineer some day.

Cal Poly Pomona’s College of Engineering created the Femineers Program in 2013 to inspire females to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields in their education and career. The program provides kindergarten through 12th-grade students with project-based learning, female engineering student mentors and opportunities to visit the Cal Poly Pomona campus.

“It’s really improving my understanding of the engineering process and design process and the actual hands-on,” Alexis Ollick, who wants to be a mechanical engineer, said.

Daisy Gibson Femineers are making solar ovens to distribute to people experiencing homelessness. The goal is to help decrease the number of fires at homeless encampments. There are more than 200 encampment fires a month, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

STEM coordinator and eighth grader teacher John Kell said the Femineers decided to make the solar ovens as a service project. They will donate the ovens with cooking utensils and food.

“The whole idea is to see, will they use them in place of a pit,” he said. The ovens cost about $20 to $25 each. Kell hopes to get donations to help for the Plexiglas covers.

“Whatever you can cook in a Crockpot or a slow cooker, you can cook in these,” he said.

Kell said Ollick lives what they talk about in the Femineers.

“She has courage, she’s confident and she’s curious,” he said. “That is what’s going to make her succeed.”

The Femineers are also learning how to program lights to change colors via coding, using an Arduino micro-controller and a Raspberry Pi breadboard.

“What inspired me to get into Femineers was the fact that there are other girls who are interested in all the different types of fields of engineering,” Alexis Ollick said. “I thought that Femineers would be a stepping stone to our goal an to get us prepared.

Just working with other girls is really fun because we’re all interested in the same thing, just different fields.”

She hopes to attend college at Cal Poly Pomona. “They created the program for schools and they can help us get way closer to our goal,” Alexis Ollick said.

She wants to encourage other female students who are interested in the engineering fields to not give up.

“To believe in yourself … to keep it somewhere where you’re going to think how you’re going to get there and don’t be afraid to fail,” Alexis Ollick said.