Summer programs helping change the face of STEM

SI/YWSI Residential Adviser and Career Panelist; Graduate Student
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College of Engineering at The Ohio State University
Thursday, February 25, 2016 - 2:15pm (updated Monday, April 4, 2016 - 8:20pm)

If you want to investigate the typical scientist stereotype, just go to cartoons. Across decades of comic books and TV shows the scientist character always looks the same: old guy with glasses, bald or crazy hair, wearing a white lab coat and ready to use his knowledge of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) to save or destroy the world. Why do they always look like that? Is this the only depiction of a scientist we can offer?

This cartoon character could not be more different from the students poised to enter the ranks of scientists around the world. The Young Women’s Science Institute (YWSI) and the Summer Institute (SI), summer programs hosted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center, are two of the many programs ready to change stereotypes and address the obstacles that are hampering women from entering STEM. As a graduate student in the OSU engineering program, I have served as a residential adviser and career panelist for these programs and gotten to observe the effect it has on the campers.

YWSI/SI and programs like this target three key areas to bring more women into STEM: creating a community, making science fun, and exposing young women to fields they were unaware of. These programs target young women at an age in which learning heavily depends on a positive social community. The camps allow smart young women to meet each other and work in groups, and talk openly with each other about science and their lives. They learn the whole week in a comfortable environment with other students who are just like them, and some of them are in this kind of environment for the first time. I've seen campers happily exchange contact information after just one week of camp so that they can keep in touch with their new friends.

In addition to creating a community, the curriculum throws a lot of information at the young women in a fun and engaging way. Both programs offer tours of different departments and research centers, hands-on experiments and demonstrations and opportunities to code and present their own projects. I see the campers get really excited about these activities in real time, and for the teachers and advisers that's a big victory. By the end of camp, the students can articulate what science activities they liked as well as all the new scientific vocabulary and concepts they've learned.

The campers are introduced to varying STEM fields over the course of the week thanks to an array of diverse speakers and OSU’s different research centers. By the end of the week the campers have all had a chance to talk with women and men who got their degrees in physics, computer science, statistics, mathematics and engineering. Usually the students take the opportunity to ask for advice on school, courses to take and applying to college. They glean as much information as possible and along the way they start learning about all the different career options that are out there.

I have seen women of all kinds at all ages make the choice to go into STEM with the help of familial support, exposure, internal motivation, and personal skillset. Programs like YWSI and SI serve as a bonus to these influences, an extra push for young women to learn and feel energized by the material and by each other. If our goal is to simultaneously close the gender gap and draw more passionate leaders to STEM fields, then programs like YWSI and SI are a crucial tool toward achieving that goal.

OSC is currently accepting applications for both SI and YWSI.For more updates on these programs, be sure to follow them on Twitter @OSC_SummerSTEM or Facebook.