As the 2024-2025 school year commences at SHS, a new club aims to give insight into the world of STEM for the fields’ minorities: women.
After the club’s first meeting on August 19, 20 girls have enrolled in the program, with the club hoping to grow from there.
Women in STEM sparked into existence as a club designed for the girls of SHS to have an equal voice and opportunity to learn about the varying fields of STEM without any background knowledge.
“It’s really open to anyone,” Ambassador Delaney Campbell said. “If you don’t really know what to do, and you don’t really know much about STEM, but you want to get to know more about STEM, then you can just join.”
While the club is still fresh to the school, WiSTEM is already making strides to develop interests and open pathways for those involved with the program.
Two projects are already in the works for these young adults, one of which is having them communicate across the world to Braeburn, a school in Kenya.
It is with these students that the members of the WiSTEM group are working to further their education through the use of tailored learning kits.
By making instructions on STEM toys, projects and technology, the hope is to grant more opportunities to low-income parts of the world, eventually being able to recreate their designs to help improve learning in other countries.
“If we cleaned up all the problems,” adviser Mark Snodgrass said. “We can then start sending those toys to other impoverished areas, like schools in Mexico, schools in Haiti, schools in Ecuador, El Salvador, India, wherever we need to send them to.”
In their first year, they already have a lineup of over 30 women representatives from large companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Endress+Hauser scheduled to meet with the group.
Snodgrass has also lined up field trips to major companies like Eli Lilly to show the girls what the real STEM world would look like and establish names for themselves.
Whether it be through meetings or trips, reaching out to professionals in the field is an opportunity to help open the doors that could possibly lead the future lives of these girls in order to make the transition into their careers a little easier.
“Now there’s a lady who works at Google who knows them almost on a professional level,” Snodgrass said. “So when they decide to go for the internship in college, they’ll be able to send her their resume … it’s about making those connections.”
Their history book may just be starting out, but the members of WiSTEM are not letting the lack of experience discourage them from their current tasks.
As the years go on, it’s a desire that new projects and people enter their organization in order to keep their program going for the women in it to continue to learn more and more.
