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It wasn’t that long ago that mostly guys walked the halls of the Speed Engineering School.

Those days are gone.

Now, gals are seen strutting their stuff down those same halls, as they should.

Amanda Eicher is one of those gals.

She was born and raised in Louisville, Ky. where she graduated from Louisville Male High School and is now a junior at Speed School at the University of Louisville.

Eicher is majoring in civil and environmental engineering.

Becoming an engineer was an easy choice for Eicher. “My father, uncle and grandfather are engineers, so I figured, why not?”

Choosing U of L was easy as well. It was “for the engineering department.”

Her plans are to get her bachelor’s degree in the summer of 2008 and her master’s degree in the summer of 2009.

She knows where she is going and how to get there.

Eicher is currently working part-time at her co-op in Louisville for K.S. Ware & Associates. and is the leader of the office, which comes as no surprise to anyone that knows her.

Being alumni of Alpha Sigma Kappa, a sorority of Women in Technical Studies as well as a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers is impressive.

According to the Extraordinary Women Engineers Web site at http://www.engineeringwomen.org, only 20 percent of undergraduate engineering students are women and less that 10 percent of the professional engineer workforce are women.

But, as seen in the halls of Speed School, the world is changing and slowly more young women like Eicher, are not afraid to be in what was once a traditionally male dominated profession.

Eicher’s mom is a legal secretary and her pops is an electrical engineer and a pro-fisherman. She is at the bottom of the food chain with an older sister and an older step brother.

Eicher loves cats – she has four – a love she inherited from her mom and she has “tons of fish.”

Besides being close to her family, Eicher keeps things in balance by shopping, doing crafts and hanging with her friends.

“I love [going to] Mitzi’s to play cards,” said Eicher. “Spades…yep, that is the game of choice.”