To begin the sixth annual STEM conference, Dina Lamdany (‘11) stepped up to the microphone in the auditorium to begin her keynote speech to the CESJDS high school on Dec. 4. Students had the chance to learn about her experiences within her career as a product manager at Roblox and a previous employee at YouTube where she worked to combat misinformation.
The 34 STEM Fellows, all high school students, have been working since the beginning of the year to prepare for the STEM conference. Each fellow was expected to reach out to at least one person and ask them to come and speak in a session. While the STEM Fellows helped with preparing for the STEM conference, Director of Upper School STEM Alexandra Brown was in charge of the overall organization, creating various spreadsheets and sending out emails.
“The STEM fellows are the people making it run on the day of [the STEM conference],” Brown said. “I literally could not do it without them.”
During the STEM conference, fellows were responsible for introducing the speaker of the room they were assigned in each of the two session blocks. They made sure each session progressed smoothly and helped facilitate conversations and promote participation.
“It’s good for the JDS community to learn about STEM professions,” STEM fellow and senior Noam Klein said. “We try to pique the interest of both students who are interested in STEM and those who aren’t.”
JDS welcomed a total of 30 speakers working in STEM industries for high schoolers to choose from based on their own interests and passions. Five out of the 30 speakers were JDS alumni, returning to speak to the current high school student body about their current jobs or past experiences. One of the alumni, Jessica Gallo (‘22) facilitated a session about fire protection engineering.
“I love what I do,” speaker Gallo said, “I really enjoy pursuing fire protection engineering, and it would be so cool to see other JDS students get involved in such a meaningful career path.”
Students selected their top session choices on a Google Form to indicate their preferences sent out prior to the STEM conference. The conference takes up half of a normal school day, so after the keynote speaker kicked off the STEM conference, there was a lunch break and then two consecutive session blocks of 45 minutes each, followed by a raffle to close out the day.
During each block, there were a multitude of sessions taking place, ranging from discussion of organ transplantation to flying cars. The variety of topics allowed students of all interests to enjoy their sessions and have a takeaway message, according to Klein.
The day ended with a raffle, where winners received prizes such as socks and candy. Students accumulated raffle tickets throughout the day for their participation in each session to be able to enter the raffle.
“I think it went really well overall. I noticed that students had a lot of positive things to say between sessions,” Brown said. “[Students] seemed to be having a good time and were interested in what they got to learn about, and that’s really the main idea.”
