Check out Surya Adams (HSTEM '18) on the cover of the Winter 2019 Issue of AACU Diversity & Democracy and highlighted in editor Emily Schuster's issue introduction, along with our story of how the Amherst Uprising in November, 2015 catalyzed the collaborative academic experiment by students and chemistry professor Sheila Jaswal, resulting in the first "Being Human in STEM" course at Amherst College in the spring of 2016. Spring semester of 2020 will be our 8th iteration of the course and the initial launch of HSTEM courses at University of Utah, Mt. Holyoke, and Davidson Colleges, joining Yale University & Williams College as sites of non-Amherst HSTEM courses!

From March 25th to the 29th, we attended the AAC&U Conference on Diversity, Equity, and Student Success in Pittsburgh, PA. Dr. Sarah Bunnell, Bonnie Lin, and I (Michaela Ednie) prepared and presented a poster during this conference. Dr. Bunnell currently works at Amherst College as the Associate Director and STEM specialist in our Center for Teaching and Learning and actively supports the HSTEM initiative. Bonnie (class of 2019) took the HSTEM course in the spring of 2018 and remains an active participant in the initiative. I began my involvement in HSTEM by co-facilitating the summer condensed course in 2018 after graduating from Amherst and continued on as the HSTEM post-bac fellow, assisting with the overall initiative and co-facilitating the spring 2019 course.

I'm confident that Dr. Bunnell and Bonnie would agree with me that the conference was a lot of fun! Due to travel restraints, Bonnie and I didn't make the keynote address the first evening, so our first event was the poster session where we were presenting. Our poster detailed some of our findings on the impact of incorporating HSTEM practices in classrooms. (Check out the full poster below!) At first, both Bonnie and I were slow and/or a little clumsy at explaining the poster to visitors. It was very early in the morning, after all. Once we got the hang of things, however, we were engaging the audience beyond just the information on the poster. Almost everyone wanted a copy of the poster and business cards. We also had the HSTEM brochure for folks to look through, but we didn’t have copies to give out. A few times during workshops or meals after the session, people who came to the poster recognized me and asked a few more questions. There were also times when the poster session in general came up and that led to more people asking questions (luckily, I was carrying more copies of the poster to give them!), so there was lots of interest in our work. I loved getting to talk about it so much!

​There were so many sessions that I was interested in, it was hard to settle on just one for each timeslot. I feel I learned a lot from the sessions I attended, and I met a lot of great people. I attended sessions on microagressions, inclusive classroom practices, program planning, and serving disadvantaged students. The closing plenary on disabilities was absolutely incredible; I really wish there was a video of it on the site! Amanda Kraus from the University of Arizona was such a great speaker and really kept the audience engaged. The thing that sticks out for me most was when I realized halfway through the presentation that Amanda was describing the location and contents of any images or figures that came up on the slides. She did it so naturally, and it’s definitely something I plan on doing in my future presentations. I consider myself to have great vision (with my glasses), but even so, I couldn’t tell what some of the pictures were from my position in the crowd. I was grateful for her descriptions, and I bet many others were as well. She pointed it out near the end of her talk as one of a few simple ways to make presentations more accessible. The presentation she used at the conference is included on the AAC&U website.

Overall, I absolutely loved this conference. I learned a lot and got to connect with people and share stories. The conference was such a great experience for me and exposure for HSTEM. I’m excited at how much interest HSTEM is generating!

-Michaela

We were at the 2018 Massachusetts PKAL Regional Meeting! Emily Ma '20, a student in the 2017 Fall HSTEM course, presented at the student panel on HSTEM and interventions at Amherst College to promote inclusion in STEM.

Here are some pictures from the meeting!

​Hello visitors and welcome to Being Human in STEM Version 2.0! A few of last semester’s students (Ashley, Ruth, and myself) have returned this year to continue our work under the guidance of Dr. Jaswal. After the success of sharing our interview project at Amherst Explorations, Yale DiversiTea, and a final CHI salon last year, we’re prepared to maintain our momentum by focusing it in a slightly different direction.
 
As Ruth, Ashley, Dr. J. and I brainstormed in early September about how to meaningfully carry our project forward, we thought back to the reactions of students, staff, and faculty who came to learn about our work. The questions and comments we received tended to center around one theme: What can I do differently?
 
Thus, for the Fall 2016 semester, we’ve decided to concentrate on forming a Diversity in STEM Tool-Kit specifically catered towards professors. Consisting of five modules, our product will aim to provide concrete, usable tools for working with students to understand and foster STEM inclusion.
 
As you may note from the lack of specifics, we’re still in the nascent phases of this project. We hope to acquire as much feedback as possible as our work progresses, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to offer input along the way  - click on the ‘Share Your Story’ link or email one of us via our information on the ‘About Us’ page. Or, if you’d prefer to observe from afar, stay tuned to this blog for periodic updates on our progress.

​-Minjee Kim

Dear Sheila Jaswal,
We hope this letter finds you well. We wanted to thank you so much for coming to speak at our DiversiTea event at Yale. We are incredibly grateful for the time you took to visit New Haven and the honesty and care you put into all of your discussions with us and the other students. It was an inspiring moment of cross-collegiate unity in a joint mission to promote diversity within the STEM fields and to make the STEM environment more welcoming to all students. It also provided us with a valuable look into the Amherst College environment and the ways that we can make our own college environment similarly welcoming. Because of your visit our Physics Department has started its own course called Being Human in STEM, modeled on the course you and your students created. You’ve not only helped to spark meaningful discussions but you’ve also helped us to enact real change in our STEM classes. DiversiTea is in its inaugural year and it is an organization at Yale that bridges the undergraduates, the graduate students, faculty, and staff in its mission to promote diversity within the STEM fields. As such we also wanted to thank you for inspiring us with your own dedication to issues of diversity within your STEM career, both in the classroom and in the lab.
Thanks again for coming to speak with us and for helping us improve our own Yale STEM environment.
Sincerely,
DiversiTea
http://ctl.yale.edu/teaching/science-instructor-resources/diversiteas

Hello Everyone! My name is Felix German Contreras-Castro, a Black Studies Major with a Pre-Med focus at Amherst College.  I will be sharing my experience at Yale’s DiversTea – a daylong event promoting diversity and inclusion in the STEM field. I’ll start off with the wonderful ride I shared with Dr. Jaswal to New Haven. Before arriving to Amherst College (Community College Transfer Student), I had never met a STEM professor of color. As we drove to CT, I clearly saw the importance of having mentors that share similar backgrounds. Dr. Jaswal is in a special position for students like myself. As a Queer Woman of Color in STEM, one can only imagine the many obstacles she surmounted. Her plethora of experiences allows her to present genuine and thoughtful advice that a Queer Black Man can apply to his life.
            As we arrived to New Haven, we were greeted by Yale students and went straight to business. I was not surprised that Yale’s STEM dilemma is similar to ours in Amherst. My experiences at Amherst have been very challenging, and at times discouraging, which seems to have resonated well with Yale students. In sum, Students of Color—especially from disadvantaged backgrounds—are left behind in STEM. There is not one objective solution because it varies from student to student.
My experience is not unusual.  I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I registered for physics at Amherst College.  I was perplexed by how an introductory course could be taught with such haste. Furthermore, it is disheartening to know that many of my colleagues found this course to be a review. This explains the unexpected lightning pace of the course. My performance forced me to withdraw and reconsider an alternative path to medicine. Yale students’ continuous head nods hinted that they too have faced this sort of challenge. Accepting failure after giving it your all can force anyone to an alternative career path. We have to have been the brightest of the bunch to gain admittance to institutions like Amherst and Yale.  Institutions like Amherst and Yale have the audacity to boast on their diverse student body, but fail to provide the services for such a vibrant community.  Not all of us hail from affluent families that can provide a rich preparatory education for elite colleges. I have depended on Google for the majority of my life as I sat in my family’s living room studying for hours while juggling jobs, and extra-curriculars, with no mentorship or guidance.
          There are few points that I would love my reader to take away from this blog. First, STEM is field where cultural understanding must be included in order to have the vibrant diversity we aim for. Second, students from disadvantaged backgrounds—especially in elite colleges—want to do well in STEM…many of us just do not know how. Third, if a professor gives up on a student, there is high probability the student will give up on himself or herself. Lastly, everyone has the potential to be a STEM person. If you do not believe this notion than you are part of the problem why so many students from disadvantaged backgrounds opt out of STEM.