We are the STEMinists, a group of girls from Irvine High who aim to generate more participation in STEM fields by promoting the involvement of underrepresented populations in STEM areas and breaking the myth that STEM pathways are difficult and unattainable.
project need
According to a 2021 report by Pew Research Center, only 9% of all STEM workers are African American, 8% are Hispanic, and 13% are Asian, compared to a 67% white population that make up the STEM workforce. We want to do this by creating a program in which we connect students and schools with industry members and college students (especially those who graduated from our school district), particularly who are part of the underrepresented groups as well as current college students. We would like our campaign to lessen intimidating misconceptions about STEM by establishing familiarity through relatability.
Meetings
The STEMinists meet every Wednesday afterschool in the engineering classroom, supervised by Mrs. Jain. We also conduct lunch meetings as needed. During these meetings, our project managers create agendas and assign the team individual tasks that need to be finished before a certain deadline.
Brainstorming
All of our team participates on a brainstorming document to list out the different activities we could do, different events we can host, and more. We also create material lists for all our events so that we know exactly how many items we should have and what the total cost is. For example, the link attached is our material list for one of our events at Cadence Park.
While some of our members work on outreach and getting connections, others work on social media, and some work on finding or creating activities for our events. Our social media and graphic designers create recap posts for our events to increase awareness. We also piloted an initiative to highlight women in STEM on our social media.
team events/evidence
We had a total of 2 in-person events and conducted a podcast. College Park Holiday Card making and Cadence Park Space Day were our two in-person events.
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At College Park, we taught fourth and fifth graders to make paper circuits using copper conductive tape, LED lights, and coin batteries. Adding the holiday theme allowed us to really teach the students in a fun way. We partnered with College Park's staff to make our holiday card-making activity a success.
We also collaborated with Cadence Park's Dads Club and PTSA to make our second year at Space Day very special. We taught students about our place in the universe through solar system bracelets and inspired a feeling of awe by helping them design and build paper straw rockets. At these events, we were able to impact and teach 150+ students about generating more participation in STEM fields by promoting the involvement of marginalized populations in STEM areas and breaking the myth that STEM pathways are too difficult.
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College Park and Cadence Park Events
STEMinist Spotlight Logo Animation
podcast
We are also lucky to have alumni connections which we utilized for our podcast, STEMinist Spotlight. Currently, we have released 2 episodes. We interviewed Ms. Stacy Soewono about her journey into STEM, where we talked about challenges she has overcome, her current passions, and her overall college/internship experience. In another episode, we spoke to Dr. Brent Freeze about his career path and the importance of diversity in STEM.
This year, the STEMinists focused on providing opportunities for younger generations to "get their hands dirty" and get into STEM. To this end, we were able to successfully conduct two events, one at College Park and one at Cadence Park that brought STEM activities to the younger generation. At College Park, 50+ students participated in our holiday card activity—a clever activity combining the holiday spirit with circuitry. The students enjoyed this lunchtime activity, and we were appreciated by the College Park Elementary School principal. At Cadence Park, for their annual "Space Day", we interacted with 100+ students to bring solar system bracelets and paper rocket building for their outdoor campout. We were also able to record two podcast episodes with an established industry professional in mechanical engineering and with an alumni from our school in college, pursuing civil engineering.
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In the short-term, we hope to see more students of underrepresented backgrounds take up the STEM elective pathways we have at our school (Project Lead the Way, computer science, web design) and join STEM extracurriculars such as StellarXplorers and First Robotics.
In the long-term, we want to mobilize the youth into developing a liking in STEM. For some of us, we realized our STEM journey started late, and we wish we knew of opportunities that exist in STEM before we entered high school. To this end, we hope that our events with the youth can inspire them to pursue STEM later in their lives. Through all our projects, we want to build students up to be the best version of themselves in terms of confidence, grit, and problem solving. These skills are extremely valuable when pursuing STEM, but equally valuable in any field and in life in general.
As our second year on this mission, we hoped to make some changes from last year to now. One was our digital impact, which we hoped to increase this year by including podcasts instead of our speaker night. However, this did not have as much of an effect as intended, because it decreased the amount our club members were interacting with planning. So, we aim to reintegrate the in-person speaker series to our plan for future years. This year, we were able to start the process of reaching out to schools and conducting events earlier (our first event was in December). However, there were large gaps between the events, so we wish we could reach out to more local schools or more speakers to fill the gaps and continue doing events from January to April.