MENTZ Girl’s Day

Beim MENTZ Girl’s Day schnuppern Schülerinnen in IT-Berufe

Magdalena, Maryam, Promedie, Anabela and Rana meet for the first time today in front of the office building at Grillparzerstraße 18. They are the participants in the first MENTZ Girls Day and all a little excited about what is in store for them today.

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At the beginning of Girls’ Day, MENTZ employees Kara Rommerskirchen and Tanja Rosenberger have come up with a fun challenge to warm up: Former MENTZ trainees compete against the “Girls’ Day” team in the MENTZ Café. They have to build a tower as high as possible with 20 spaghetti and a single marshmallow. The boys’ team has a narrow lead here. But everyone has fun.

The nationwide Girls’ Day provides practical experience in professions and fields of study in which women are still underrepresented. “We want to promote the next generation of women in computer science, science, and technology,” says Kristina Meine, Human Resources employee at MENTZ and co-organizer. In fact, about 30 percent of the people working at MENTZ are women, which is significantly more than the average in IT companies. Many women work as software developers, system administrators, or team and division leaders, like Kara Rommerskirchen, who is the head of the traffic planning systems development division at MENTZ with almost 40 employees.

15-year-old Magdalena Wurzer attends the ninth grade at the arts branch of the Korbinian Aigner Gymnasium in Erding. “I can already imagine working in an IT profession later on,” she says.Together with the other girls, she assembled a PC with MENTZ system administrator Tanja, inserted a graphics card and hard drive, and then installed the operating system.”When we visited the server room, we then saw how all the computers work together in the background,” says Magdalena.

After a pizza lunch break with some other colleagues, we went out onto the street with a MENTZ app and a tablet, to an underground station. “There we collected data with the app: How many steps are there from the pavement to the platform, are there escalators and lifts? How wide is the lift door and does a wheelchair user fit through it?”, explains Magdalena. Back in the office, the participants were then allowed to complete a small programming task on a MENTZ app. At the end, Managing Director Christoph Mentz personally said goodbye to the five participants with a small gift and a Girls’ Day certificate.