Five young women from the Great Neck South High School Robotics Team recently attended a conference in Manhattan to meet with successful female professionals in the engineering field.

This full-day conference, known as the Skanska Day of Discovery, was sponsored by the Skanska Women’s Network to introduce high school girls to careers in the fields of construction, architecture, and engineering. Skanska is a global project development and construction group with clients in the public and private sectors.

The Day of Discovery included discussions with successful female professionals about their rewarding careers in engineering, followed by a walk through the Moynihan Train Hall project, which is an expansion to New York City’s iconic Pennsylvania Station.

After gaining an overview of this major construction project and meeting with the professionals who make the project happen, South High students Emily Cheng, Grace Chou, Julia Motchkavitz, Eleni Polichronakis, and Miriam Shamash toured the underground construction area linking Penn Station and the James A. Farley Post Office, located across Eighth Avenue, for a rare inside look at this tremendous transportation project.

“This opportunity gave me a behind-the-scenes understanding of such a vital part of our city’s future transportation infrastructure,” explained Emily Cheng. Miriam Shamash said she was “blown away by the magnitude of the project,” and that the women engineers she met were “amazing and inspirational.”