Looking back at my last year spent at the university and thinking about the incidents that have made me compare my experiences here and back home, I realize that doing outreach would have to be one of these incidents. I had never done anything like this in my home country and I would not have had the chance if I had decided to pursue my higher education there. When I was in high school, I did not visit any university, nor did I have any visits from universities to my high school. Would it have mattered, maybe? In this blog post, I plan to share my experience with doing two outreach activities that I had the opportunity to do as a member of my research group.
The first outreach activity was in October 2015, when we visited students from the St. Elmo Brady STEM Academy program at the Booker T. Washington STEM Academy in Champaign, Illinois. Some trivia: the program is named after St. Elmo Brady, the first African American to earn a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The purpose of the program is to expose underrepresented fourth and fifth grade boys to science. The second outreach activity was an activity scheduled for the GAMES Camp 2016 in the Chemical Engineering track earlier this summer. The camp provides high school girls with hands-on exercises to help them consider a career in engineering.
Both events were starkly different. How do we get fourth graders excited about computational biophysics research? Well, brainstorming helped, and we finally came up with small puzzles and games for them to play that would help them learn about proteins and amino acids. On one of the evenings we (5 graduate students and 1 post-doc) were deciding on the rules for the game: when would a kid be given 1 candy as a reward, and when would it be 2? We even played a mock round in our lab. We had to ponder whether we should let them take the models home. But what if they worked in teams, would they be fighting each other over who got to take them home? Clearly, it was easier said than done when Dr. Olivia Castellini, the Senior Exhibit Developer at the Museum of Science + Industry at Chicago, told me to make these activities fun for the kids to engross them and fascinate them about science in general. In the end though, it is a very optimistic feeling to see the students asking questions and being genuinely curious. I would never have thought a kid could remember the name of a tricky amino acid such as phenylalanine. He sure got a candy (I myself had to mug up the names of all the amino acids for my qualification exam)! Did they actually learn something through our efforts? Hopefully!
For the GAMES Camp, we were dealing with a more mature set of students. They had voluntarily decided to come to the camp, or their parents had decided to send them. However, had we made them look at presentations and just given them a lecture, I am sure they would have been rather repulsed by the idea of pursuing this field for their college education. Some of the activities were similar to what our group had done in the previous year. The introduction was exactly same and we realized just in the nick of time that we had to change “2015” to “2016”! I personally had a lot of fun interacting with the girls and explaining to them what they were looking at in a visualization software program. My favorite part was when a girl created an animation on the software and asked me whether she could record it on her phone to show her parents when she went back home after the week-long camp.
In addition to these programs, I also volunteered for the Illinois Science Olympiad regional round, which took place at UIUC on April 16, 2016. The event for which I was a volunteer, Fast Facts, was pretty interesting to me. It involved filling in a sheet with 5 different science categories listed along the horizontal axis and 5 different letters of the alphabet listed along the vertical axis, in 10 minutes. You should have read the things that the kids wrote! Haha, I just remembered a funny one: for the category ‘Geoscience’, one team wrote tectonic plates (letter T) and plate tectonic (letter P). Unfortunately, they got credit only for one of them. It was great fun for 4 of us who were scoring the answers from the teams. We ended up googling so many things that day to be certain that we gave credit where it was due.
I am sure there are lot of outreach initiatives from multiple groups all across the university. Not just graduate students, but undergraduate students, too. I definitely look forward to doing more. In fact, I would also like to do something along these lines in my own home country, too. If you want to share your outreach story, you can always send me an email at smittal6@illinois.edu.
Happy weekend!