Volunteer, Outreach, & Extracurriculars

In our bi-weekly events, we would typically plan 2-3 activities for the students relating to specific STEM topics. Activities included stomp rockets, making slime and bouncy balls, building and programming robots, learning basic circuits, making spaghetti and marshmallow bridges, catapults, and 3D printing. The club is entirely student-run, so I spent a lot of time teaching the science behind all of these activities and answering questions the students had. We were able to create good relationships with the students and their parents, which kept many students coming back until they had graduated to high school.

This program was particularly important to me as someone who identified as a woman in STEM and later as a non-binary student in STEM, so I wanted to help provide a safe space for these students to learn more about the field and feel comfortable in their own abilities. This is such a pivotal age for many underrepresented communities in STEM, so it is vital to show them that they can feel welcome and like STEM is an option as a career, regardless of gender.

We work closely with the Mechanical Engineering Summer Camps program and have many students who go on to participate in both. Currently, we are working to be able to do outreach in the classrooms at local schools during the school day and even extend our club to the Denver area as well.

Student Teaching Practicum

As a freshman in the music education program for my first semester of college, I participated in a student teaching course. Through this, I was able to work with Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, CO with younger trumpet players. For this, I wrote lesson plans to teach small sectionals with with the group to help them gain a better understanding of the music they were going to perform at a festival. Additionally, I also helped to teach them basic marching band techniques for their homecoming performance.

STEM Club Outreach Participant

I was part of the Valencia High School STEM club where we hosted outreach events at local elementary schools once a month to showcase hands-on experiments and explanations for nanoscience concepts.

NASA's L'SPACE Program - Mission Concept Academy

L'SPACE - Lucy Student Pathway Accelerator and Competency Enabler - is a free online course offered by NASA through ASU that allows me to learn concepts in mission design. Over the course of the semester, I will receive mission development skills training from NASA scientists and engineers, as well as collaborate with other students to design a mission-related team project.

oSTEM

Focuses on providing students in the LGBT+ community with resources to succeed academically and in their careers, as well as learn from mentors.

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)

American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)