Sometimes in the evening, long after her last class of the day, Patricia Medina has an uncommon urge. She wants to go back to school.

“I want to come at night and just, like, make something,” said Patricia, a sophomore at University High School in West Los Angeles.

What could reduce an otherwise bright, engaging student to dreams of breaking and entering? In Patricia’s case, it’s the lure of engineering — the chance to build a robot or design a bridge, to create something that bears no resemblance to the typical high school assignment.

There are plenty of others like Patricia at Uni High’s new Academy of Engineering, one of 13 such academies opened in the United States last fall under a national grant program. The network, which will expand to 110 schools nationally by 2012, is intended to draw more women, blacks and Latinos into engineering and generally bump up the number of American engineers. [read full article at the Los Angeles Times]