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Nov. 16th, 2011 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lonesparkLast night I was at a meeting of a professional organization of environmental scientists and there was a presentation by one of the recipients of the org's scholarship program. She's a college freshman now, and was a high school sophomore and junior when she performed the work her presentation was based on.
She did a really good job - in the sense that her work and her presentation would not have been out of place at most of the professional conferences I have attended. Everyone in the audience was impressed, and when she was taking questions some folks jokingly asked whether she was really that young and whether she had a life outside of being Science-y Awesome. She said she did lots of stuff, like have friends and do sports. Her projects were in the Science Fair and won awards, so I guess they fit in with high school life.
One more relevant fact is that her father is an environmental scientist, who was giving the main lecture at that meeting.
I was just marveling the whole time about the fact that I really didn't know anything about science or any STEM-related activities outside of plain old science class, and plain old science class was often seriously lacking. (Ask me how I feel about having the "Earth Science" teacher who skipped all the geology parts sometime.) Did my middle or high school participate in Science Fairs? I have no idea. I have the vague sense that there were, like, robotics camps or something, somewhere, but those were places for rich kids.
I was, and am, a card-carrying nerd, and a privileged one, but my parents were language arts and psychology majors, and their few friends who were engineers and so forth didn't talk about work when they visited, and often went back overseas after a while. I did do music and sports and later on I did drama and that conflicted too much with everything else...but that was in high school...I'm kind of curious whether stuff was available and I just wasn't aware of it. I did do the middle school Geography Bee.
Last week I was at a talk about career advancement for environmental science/engineering/tech sorts. One of the panelists (who was a white guy...like they mostly are...and like the audience largely is, at these things) said something like "I'm an engineer, so the math and technical parts came easy for me...I'm sure that's true for most of you, too..." It probably was true for most of that audience...although another one of the three panelists spoke up to say it wasn't true for her, and couldn't have been because of her educational and career path.
Anyway I hear that kind of thing a lot and it's really frustrating. Certain kinds of math and technical problems don't come easy to lots of people. So? Study and practice and understanding and wanting to make a difference and bringing diverse points of view are really important, too. Especially when the "math came easy...because my dad was an engineer...and I went to robot camp...and my uncle owns a tech company..." people have a huge head start.
I just...I want more kids to have the opportunities that girl had and has. We can't all necessarily be her, be that focused, that well-spoken that comfortable and confident. But I want kids like me to have a chance at it. And I desperately want kids like the ones my dad works with to have it. It seems insurmountably impossible given the current state of education, and the economy, and yet it seems imperative and crucial for the future of our communities and our nation.
(I wanted a scientist icon for this post. Miko Kusinagi is a scientist, but she is not doing anything science-y in the icon. I don't think she's even wearing a lab coat. Oh well.)
She did a really good job - in the sense that her work and her presentation would not have been out of place at most of the professional conferences I have attended. Everyone in the audience was impressed, and when she was taking questions some folks jokingly asked whether she was really that young and whether she had a life outside of being Science-y Awesome. She said she did lots of stuff, like have friends and do sports. Her projects were in the Science Fair and won awards, so I guess they fit in with high school life.
One more relevant fact is that her father is an environmental scientist, who was giving the main lecture at that meeting.
I was just marveling the whole time about the fact that I really didn't know anything about science or any STEM-related activities outside of plain old science class, and plain old science class was often seriously lacking. (Ask me how I feel about having the "Earth Science" teacher who skipped all the geology parts sometime.) Did my middle or high school participate in Science Fairs? I have no idea. I have the vague sense that there were, like, robotics camps or something, somewhere, but those were places for rich kids.
I was, and am, a card-carrying nerd, and a privileged one, but my parents were language arts and psychology majors, and their few friends who were engineers and so forth didn't talk about work when they visited, and often went back overseas after a while. I did do music and sports and later on I did drama and that conflicted too much with everything else...but that was in high school...I'm kind of curious whether stuff was available and I just wasn't aware of it. I did do the middle school Geography Bee.
Last week I was at a talk about career advancement for environmental science/engineering/tech sorts. One of the panelists (who was a white guy...like they mostly are...and like the audience largely is, at these things) said something like "I'm an engineer, so the math and technical parts came easy for me...I'm sure that's true for most of you, too..." It probably was true for most of that audience...although another one of the three panelists spoke up to say it wasn't true for her, and couldn't have been because of her educational and career path.
Anyway I hear that kind of thing a lot and it's really frustrating. Certain kinds of math and technical problems don't come easy to lots of people. So? Study and practice and understanding and wanting to make a difference and bringing diverse points of view are really important, too. Especially when the "math came easy...because my dad was an engineer...and I went to robot camp...and my uncle owns a tech company..." people have a huge head start.
I just...I want more kids to have the opportunities that girl had and has. We can't all necessarily be her, be that focused, that well-spoken that comfortable and confident. But I want kids like me to have a chance at it. And I desperately want kids like the ones my dad works with to have it. It seems insurmountably impossible given the current state of education, and the economy, and yet it seems imperative and crucial for the future of our communities and our nation.
(I wanted a scientist icon for this post. Miko Kusinagi is a scientist, but she is not doing anything science-y in the icon. I don't think she's even wearing a lab coat. Oh well.)
