STEM Girl Day is an annual event hosted at UT for the Women in STEM community with student organizations such as the Society of Physics Students, UT Austin Association of Women in Astronomy Research and Education and Gender Matters in Physics, or GMiP. Students in grades K-8 come to participate in activities hosted by these organizations that explain a variety of STEM topics to spark girls’ interest in the fields.
However, high school students lack the same opportunities that UT could use to promote career services and higher education opportunities for students interested in STEM.
Physics and astronomy sophomore Alyson Tran is an officer for GMiP and has organized and led activities for kids at the event to teach science concepts. STEM Girl Day’s benefit as a public event is that it has something for everyone and draws them in.
“The event is really big, so there’s a really great diversity of things they have,” Tran said. “There’s a good variety of things for the younger kids who maybe don’t have as much background in science, and a good amount of stuff for the older (kids) … but I think that it caters pretty well to that age group.”
While many events are targeted for youth, concepts can be explained more thoroughly for an older audience through the addition of more complex concepts and activities.
“I feel like a lot of the events are definitely targeted more towards younger kids in the way that they’re organized, being more crafty and a lot simpler in the concepts they teach, but if they added maybe more advanced lectures or demos and experiments, maybe they could expand it to the older kids,” Tran said.
Ansh Gupta, a second-year astronomy graduate student, said that while the planetarium demo he runs is for all ages, the event’s size causes challenges if the age group is extended.
“For our demo, I think high schoolers would definitely enjoy our show,” Gupta said. “Even adults enjoy our show. You know, they’ll come with their kids, and they’ll watch it and leave just as amazed, if not more.For us, one of the bottlenecks is our planetarium can only fit so many people, and if you have younger kids, they physically take up less space, and so, you can accommodate more people if they’re younger.”
Despite the limitations, one of the key aspects of the event is creating hands-on opportunities for students exposed to a lecture-learning environment that creates fear of failure instead of a growth mindset.
“I think it’s great if you can engage high schoolers, because you have a lot of high schoolers that have grown up in the system where we’re failing them in their science education, and we have to give them an experience that tells them ‘Hey, science is worth pursuing,’” Gupta said.
Through STEM Girl Day, the public gets to see female career advancement present in commonly known male-dominated fields — marking a shift in traditional female roles and challenging gender stereotypes. Exposure and support for young girls to pursue STEM is important from an early age, as it encourages their mindsets to pursue future careers in the field.
“I think STEM Girl Day is a great event that the school hosts for the general public,” Tran said. “It really shows off everything that the students at UT have achieved, and especially the women here, and how much we’ve advanced (as) women in STEM in the past few decades.”
Including the impending future of our generation through high schoolers at STEM Girl Day would show how higher education cultivates curiosity, careers and the limitless horizons. Such exposure would be beneficial not only for their careers but also for female advancement in the field, as scientific advancement in traditionally male-dominated fields has a long history of pushing boundaries in gender roles.
Medha Shah is a physics freshman from Frisco, Texas.
