About 5 years ago, my daughter, who is now an 18 year old college sophomore, came storming into the living room and declared, “Check this out! This mom thinks that if you want to raise a daughter to be interested in STEM, all you have to do is tell her to do well in math!” It was an article that she found online . . . probably a link that she saw on Twitter. She was mostly correct, that was the gist of the article. So, with her “determined personality,” as we like to affectionately refer to it, she contacted the author of the article. The essence of her conversation was, “Seriously? That’s it? My parents raised a girl interested in STEM and it takes a lot more than that. Can they write an article for you?” And so here I sit at my keyboard, digesting what my “determined” daughter has done.
First, let me give you some background where my daughter is now before I tell you how we got here. We are a humble family, so we try not to brag, but you need to see the destination before you’ll understand the trip. Krystal has a minor planet named after her because of her science fair accomplishments. I’m not kidding. It’s called 28720 Krystalrose and if it’s anything like her, it will probably destroy the planet in sparks and flames someday. Krystal has toured the White House and met former President Obama also as a result of her science achievements. She has won district, county, state, and international science fairs. She was one of 30 Broadcom MASTERS national finalists and won the Rising Stars award there, earning the right to be one of two U.S. representatives in International Broadcom MASTERS. Krystal recently became one of 20 national Back to Space Ambassadors where she may have a chance at going up on a commercial space flight with an Apollo astronaut.
In school, Krystal’s GPA is above a 4.7. By the end of junior year, she had taken 16 college classes and 5 AP classes including AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Calculus, College Physics, College Astronomy, College Geology, College Psychology, College Abnormal Psychology, College Marine Science, College Biopsychology, and College Logic and Critical Thinking. And that’s just the STEM classes! Krystal has been on competitive robotics teams for 6 years. Her sophomore team was the in the top 20 in the world out of more than 14,000 teams. She went to the World Championships for the second year in a row her junior year with a different team. Krystal was on our school’s Ten80 Racing team (the best in the nation 2 out of the last 3 years) and used an Arduino to make an RC car drive around the track autonomously using sensors. Krystal has leadership roles in the Engineering Club, Computer Programming Club, Nature Photography Club, and Leadership Development Club. She also has had her research published in which she participated in a collaboration between her school, the local community college, the local university, and the management board of the local nature reserve to analyze the genome sequences of insects to determine the health of the insects on the reserve compared to insects living geographically near the reserve (https://www.emerginginvestigators.org/articles/using-dna-barcodes-to-evaluate-ecosystem-health-in-the-swrcms-reserve). She was an intern with Yonder Dynamics, a group of university engineering students who build Mars rovers for a national university competition. For two summers, she was an apprentice at a US Navy engineering laboratory, NAVSEA 40 hours a week while teaching computer programming classes to girls on Saturdays.
So, how did this all begin? Many kids hope to be an astronaut or an archaeologist someday. Krystal did, too. She wanted to be an astronaut. So, we supported the heck out of that! We checked out astronomy-related books from the library, we watched science television, we took her to see science guest speakers at universities, we visited science fairs, our vacations were planned around science destinations, we visited a different museum every weekend for several months, we subscribed to science magazines in her name. One of the best strategies for getting her excited about science was listening to science podcasts in the car. We listened to Scientific American’s 60-Second Science almost every day as well as Science Friday, The Naked Scientists, the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, and more.
Krystal didn’t collect baseball cards or dolls, she collected astronaut autographs. She has taken photos with Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, Tracy Caldwell, Wendy Lawrence, Al Worden, Charlie Duke, Yvonne Cagle, Dan Bursch, Gregory Johnson, Jeanette Epps, and more. She has autographed books from many of these astronauts as well as Nobel Prize winners and scientists like Michio Kaku.
We aren’t naïve enough to think that taking Krystal to museums is going to seal her destiny as an astronaut, but her quest to become an astronaut was her motivation to strive to learn science, do well in school, and practice science communication. It was the spark that set her role models as astronauts, scientists, and science authors. Instead of going to dance lessons, she works in university labs on weekends. Instead of playing soccer, she builds robots. And instead of watching television, she writes scripts for videos and podcasts. Our support of that goal is what made her ambitions come to fruition.
Science fair has been one of the absolute greatest motivators of all for her. She started working with university professors when she was in 4th grade. We didn’t have any connections with the university, we just started emailing them. She has traveled to four states as a result of her projects, has been trained in university lab safety and cyber-security, has used equipment that most students have never seen, and has been surrounded by professional scientists and graduate students.
We have traveled the country in pursuit of great science as well. As a teacher and administrator, I have at least a couple of weeks each year that we can travel. We went to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, The Exploratorium, Yosemite, Yellowstone, The New England Aquarium, The Smithsonian, Kennedy Space Center, all of the national parks in Utah, the Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater Arizona, Sedona, Vandenberg Air Force Base, The California Science Center, Cabrillo Tide Pools, The Discovery Science Center, The Friends of Amateur Rocketry site, numerous natural history museums, Scripps Aquarium, Balboa Park, the SEE Science Center, the La Brea Tar Pits, PennyPickle’s Workshop, Aquarium of the Pacific, Space Center Houston . . . those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. One of the greatest science vacations that we took was the result of attending a lecture. We connected with an aerospace engineer from Lockheed Martin near Denver. He was working on a spacecraft (Osiris-Rex) that will travel to an asteroid and bring samples back to Earth. He invited Krystal to come to Colorado and see the spacecraft. She got to suit up in cleanroom garb and visit Osiris in a testing chamber and speak to many engineers who had worked on it (see photos below). Then, she was invited to go to Florida and watch the rocket launch that would deliver Osiris to space. What a motivational two trips for a girl who wants to be an aerospace engineer! Breaking News: Krystal was an intern at that exact Lockheed Martin the summer of her freshman year of college!
The second most important thing that we’ve done for Krystal is to enroll her in a very high achieving, STEM-focused charter school (Declaration: I am the assistant principal of the school, so there could be some bias). Here, she is surrounded by other students who are interested in STEM and are serious about their education. Enrollment at the school is purely lottery-based, but the people who bother to apply are more serious about their education than the ones who don’t. This school opened opportunities for her to compete in FIRST FTC Robotics, Ten80 racing, Science Olympiad as well as taking Advanced Placement and college classes. Her goal of attending MIT demanded such a school and she has put in the work to be successful here. Could she have become an aerospace engineer at another school? Probably. But this school has opened doors for her to choose which engineering college she wants to attend.
I read an article in a magazine once discussing the idea that geniuses come in waves and proposing the question, “Where are all of the geniuses now?” The answer that they suggested is that there are many geniuses now, but they are all athletic geniuses. A world record is broken every day in one sport or another. Our children spend dozens of hours per week practicing sports. We pay money to get them on the best team with the best coach and travel the country for tournaments. But how many of our children spend dozens of hours per week on science? How many of us get professional science coaches for our children? How many of us travel to science destinations? How many of our children are in science competitions? The article purported (and I agree) that if we spent as much time with our children in science as we do in sports, we would be producing scientific geniuses too. In our family, we practice science, we get science mentors, we work on science projects, we watch science on television, and we participate in science competitions.
It has been said that if you map out how much time you spend on certain things in a day, you can find out what’s important to you. So, we made sure to give Krystal plenty of time with science daily. She had science books, science podcasts, science television, science movies, science museums, science vacations, science toys, and science activities. She didn’t have doll houses or bicycles. She had Snap Circuits, Lego Mindstorms, a telescope, and several microscopes. There was nothing more fun for her as a child than looking at pond water under a microscope or counting the moons of Jupiter through a telescope.
It is possible that this recipe will only work for Krystal, but I highly suspect that spending time with science, focusing on scientific role models, talking about science careers, and attending a science school would go a long way towards motivating many girls to pursue college majors and careers in science. In fact, I would guess that this recipe would work for sports, art, history, whatever your child is interested in. It may come as a surprise to you that we are not some super-nerdy family. My son is a college baseball player and he wants to be a baseball coach as a career. He has been to baseball stadiums in Arizona, Utah, Missouri, Florida, Texas, New York, Philadelphia, Colorado, Massachusetts, etc. He reads about baseball, watches baseball on TV, plays baseball video games, and had excellent baseball coaches. Baseball is his passion, so we supported the heck out of it too!
Every child is different, but I suspect that this is a general recipe for feeding your child’s interests to motivate them to a career in that area. Support it, read about it, watch it on TV, listen to podcasts about it, plan travel around it, set up role models and mentors around it, participate in competitions within their passions, decorate their living space around it, etc. Krystal makes us proud every day to see her pursuing her passions, to see the look of disgust on her face when the “Women’s Interest” section at Barnes and Noble is all makeup and fashion and when she sees all of the girls’ section at Target filled with pink toys. We’re confident that she will be successful in whatever she chooses to pursue because she has a passion and we supported her in it.
Krystal (second from the left) in a cleanroom at Lockheed Martin in Colorado.
Krystal’s photo of Osiris-Rex taking off to rendezvous with an asteroid and bring back samples
Sorry, the rest of the photos had to be removed because of Blogger limitations on file size.
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