Girls Science Day

As graduate students, many of us are always seeking ways of getting involved with outreach opportunities, particularly ones that give us teaching experience (for those of us who are interested in pursuing careers in academia or teaching).  As a woman, I am also always looking for ways of getting young girls excited about science.  I think that it's important for girls to see that science can be fun and that there are people like them who are making a career of it.  Because of this, I was really excited when I heard about an annual event at Columbia called Girls Science Day.

Girls Science Day is an event run by graduate students at Columbia where over 100 middle school aged girls come to participate in hands-on experiments in a range of sciences.  Experiments range from extracting DNA from strawberries to learning how acoustic signals travel in water and are used for active source seismic imaging.  You can see a couple of examples of experiments that we have organized for this event on this blog!

While organizing this event for the last couple of years, the importance of incorporating hands-on learning into science education for young students has become very clear to me.  I hope that everyone will take advantage of the opportunity that we have during this AGU Student Pop-up session to try to learn about new and exciting ways of engaging the broader public, and particularly children.  Through science education and outreach, we are hopefully able to inspire kids, particularly kids who might grow up thinking that they will never be able to be a scientist because of their gender, race, or socioeconomic background, to get excited about all that a career in science has to offer.

While this is a pretty large-scale event to organize, it has been a wonderful opportunity to bring graduate students from a range of fields together.  Events like this can be the perfect forum to implement some of the ideas that we'll be learning about during the AGU session, Teaching and Career Challenges in the Geosciences.