{"id":117933,"date":"2022-05-25T17:25:53","date_gmt":"2022-05-25T21:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=117933"},"modified":"2022-10-21T17:07:29","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T21:07:29","slug":"stemming-a-grade-school-brain-drain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2022\/05\/25\/stemming-a-grade-school-brain-drain\/","title":{"rendered":"Stemming a Grade-School Brain Drain"},"content":{"rendered":"

With nonprofit and book, alumna seeks to hook girls on STEM fields<\/strong><\/h3>\n

By Patrick L. Kennedy<\/strong><\/p>\n

The girls raised their hands to ask and answer questions when Sarah Foster (ENG\u201905) visited her sons\u2019 second- and third-grade class\u00adrooms as a volunteer, running engi\u00adneering activities. Evidently, both boys and girls were curious about science, technology, engineering and math, and they participated equally.<\/p>\n

But when her sons reached fourth and fifth grades, Foster noticed an unfortunate trend: The girls were keeping their hands down. As if they\u2019d already concluded they weren\u2019t welcome in STEM discussions. \u201cI was surprised to see that gender gap happening at such a young age.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Sarah Foster (ENG’05). Photo by Acorn Studios.
<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That\u2019s when Foster decided to launch STEM Like a Girl, a nonprofit education program with a mission to excite and empower girls with knowledge and confidence in the STEM fields. Recently, she published a book. STEM Like a Girl: Empowering Knowledge and Confidence to Lead, Innovate, and Create <\/em>is a collection of experiments\u2014culled from Foster\u2019s many workshops\u2014that kids can do with ordinary household goods. \u201cI wanted to create a resource that shows girls you don\u2019t have to be a famous scientist. You can do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a child, Foster enjoyed and excelled in science and math. In high school, her teachers recognized that aptitude and were encouraging, but only in one or two directions, she recalls. \u201cThey said, \u2018Why don\u2019t you be either a doctor or a science teacher?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

So, she enrolled in Bucknell University as a pre\u00admed major. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until then that a professor said to me, \u2018Have you thought about engineering?\u2019 That\u2019s when I got into chemical engineering and really found my interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

After doing a summer internship in BU\u2019s Bio\u00admedical Engineering Department, Foster realized she wanted to do research. \u201cReally, I\u2019m an engineer by nature,\u201d she says. \u201cI have a very analytical thought process, and I loved the idea of planning out exper\u00adiments, seeing what worked, what didn\u2019t work and adjusting from there. So, I liked the whole methodol\u00adogy of experimentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

That experience led her to enroll in the BME master\u2019s degree program. \u201cI liked that I could be doing projects that were helping people; that had a direct impact on people\u2019s lives,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

At ENG, Foster was inspired by mentors such as Professor Joyce Wong<\/a> (BME<\/a>, MSE<\/a>). \u201cSeeing these strong women in their careers and families was important for me and shaped what I ultimately went on to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

After earning her master\u2019s, Foster was hired as an R&D engi\u00adneer for Genzyme (now Sanofi Genzyme), where she worked on hydrogel technol\u00adogy for implant\u00adable devices.<\/p>\n

After several years, Foster, her husband and their two young boys moved to Portland, Oregon. That\u2019s where she was volunteering in her sons\u2019 elementary school and discovered the STEM gender gap rearing its head earlier than she\u2019d expected.<\/p>\n

She launched STEM Like a Girl in 2017 with a volunteer board drawn from Portland\u2019s female engi\u00adneer community. The group hosts half-day workshops where girls, along with their parents or other caregiv\u00aders, take part in hands-on activities, learn about the design process and meet female STEM mentors.<\/p>\n

The inclusion of parents in the activities is intended to reach families in which there\u2019s no STEM role model. \u201cWe\u2019ve heard from a lot of parents who weren\u2019t trained in a STEM background, so they\u2019re not comfortable with it themselves. This is a chance for them to share in their daughter\u2019s excitement and try things together.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Photo by Acorn Studios<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Examples of experiments in the workshops and in the book include making an air cannon out of a paper cup and a bag; making a fizzy bath bomb with baking soda, citric acid, Epsom salt and corn starch; and making a rocket out of a drinking straw and construction paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of my favorites is when they get to isolate DNA from a strawberry,\u201d says Foster. \u201cThat can be a little messy, but it\u2019s a lot of fun. We take strawberries and mash them up and extract out the chromosomal DNA from the strawberry. You can actually see it separating in the liquid that you use, and you pull out this glob of DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n

Foster and her colleagues tie these kitchen exper\u00adiments to their real-world applications, and they stress that experiments rarely go right the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cSTEM teaches us so much about life in general,\u201d says Foster. \u201cWe can learn leadership skills, confi\u00addence, problem-solving techniques. And it\u2019s import\u00adant for girls, especially, to build that confidence and see that these are careers you can do. A lot of girls want to go into careers where they can help people\u2014and there are so many opportunities in STEM for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo at top: Jenna Perfette Photography<\/em><\/p>\n

This story originally appeared in the spring 2022 issue of <\/em>ENGineer<\/a>, the alumni magazine of the Boston University College of Engineering<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With nonprofit and book, alumna seeks to hook girls on STEM fields By Patrick L. Kennedy The girls raised their hands to ask and answer questions when Sarah Foster (ENG\u201905) visited her sons\u2019 second- and third-grade class\u00adrooms as a volunteer, running engi\u00adneering activities. Evidently, both boys and girls were curious about science, technology, engineering and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":129523,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236],"tags":[367],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117933"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117933"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129524,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117933\/revisions\/129524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}