By Devika Kumar
STEMGirls, a club at MHS focused on empowering women in the STEM field, has been doing virtual tours of college campuses as a way to give members the campus tours they were promised at the beginning of the year. STEMGirls began giving virtual tours in March and still hope to continue doing it throughout quarantine.
Due to Covid-19, in-person campus tours have been canceled. So, as a way to help members get an idea of what the college life is like on campus, STEMGirls has made it possible for them to see the college campuses through virtual tours, Club President Mahika More said. According to More, it has been a struggle to allow the members to participate in many big events they had planned because of everything being canceled.
“Definitely the biggest setback STEMGirls struggled with was the cancellation of our events, especially our biggest one, Bridgehacks,” More said. “We had been planning some of these events since September.”
It has been hard to get over the fact that they are unable to go visit the college campuses, More said. Virtual tours aren’t just the same as in-person tours, More said.
“A large aspect of our club is touring companies and schools,” More said. “So many of our events like our Google tour as well as our Stanford tour got canceled. This was really disappointing. We have tried to compensate by sending free resources to the students and keep them engaged in a way so that their time at home is still educational, like having them participate in virtual tours. During quarantine, we have still tried to stay active and engaging our members because there was basically a whole semester left when places were starting to get shut down and school was about to close.”
According to More, one major effort STEMGirls did was to move these campus tours online. Their biggest event was a series about college spanning six weeks, where they had students from four different colleges speak about their experiences, More said.
“The responses we got from this series were amazing,” More said. “At each talk we had 20 to 30 students attend and for our large college tour, we had over 50 underclassmen show up. This was definitely the first time we had done online talks like this and we plan to continue them because they were so successful.”
According to Club Treasurer Sinai Chang, she hated letting go of all the exciting events they had planned for. However, having these virtual college tours helped with having members stay connected with the club, she said.
“Our club did not fail in keeping contact with our members during quarantine,” Chang said. “Fortunately we had the opportunities to host intriguing live talks with students from UC schools and other schools around the Bay Area. During quarantine, I had the chance to ask questions to these students from schools I could have potentially attended for college and take a deeper insight of their campus life and academics — an experience I never had as a junior in high school.”
According to Club Vice President Tran Le, hosting these online workshops was very rewarding to the members, as well as the officers. They even posted the workshops on their youtube channel which can be accessed at https://bit.ly/stemgirlsyoutube, she said.
“We hosted a month-long college workshop including four guest speakers from Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Jose State University, and UC Davis,” Le said. “We ended with a “Demystifying College Apps Workshop” hosted by our STEMgirls seniors. Overall, we had over 150 participants for this workshop.”
According to Le, the officers loved hosting workshops on Zoom. It was exciting to see anew aspect to STEMGirls which can also be incorporated to next year with all the new and exciting events STEMGirls has planned for next year, Le said.