STEM UP report Cydney Snyder
This project is important not only because it is a good thing to provide children with education and better possible job opportunities. This project is important because millions of students grow up in rural communities and believe that their community is not “good enough”. In development, growth is seen as an indicator of progress which leads to a lack of understanding of places that choose and rejoice in staying small. When students have to leave their communities in order to find more educational opportunities, they are not taught about subjects that relate to their experiences and their communities. Furthermore, when students leave their communities, they quickly find that people think of small rural communities a lesser. As a result, these students learn to reject small town values and traditions, they deny the good parts of their upbringing, and repress those aspects of their background that make them feel “other”. This camp, and in general the movement of place-based education, can provide students with a new narrative of what it means to be from rural, while also giving them the opportunity to have a more well-rounded and adequate STEM education.
This project is important not only because it is a good thing to provide children with education and better possible job opportunities. This project is important because millions of students grow up in rural communities and believe that their community is not “good enough”. In development, growth is seen as an indicator of progress which leads to a lack of understanding of places that choose and rejoice in staying small. When students have to leave their communities in order to find more educational opportunities, they are not taught about subjects that relate to their experiences and their communities. Furthermore, when students leave their communities, they quickly find that people think of small rural communities a lesser. As a result, these students learn to reject small town values and traditions, they deny the good parts of their upbringing, and repress those aspects of their background that make them feel “other”. This camp, and in general the movement of place-based education, can provide students with a new narrative of what it means to be from rural, while also giving them the opportunity to have a more well-rounded and adequate STEM education.
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summer camps available in the DFW area. However, most of these opportunities have yet<br />
to reach rural areas. These barriers to entry mean that students from rural communities<br />
who want to go to college to study <strong>STEM</strong> face more challenges when filling out their<br />
applications for college.<br />
For example, one student from Celina, Texas, applied to all eight ivy league<br />
colleges, Stanford, Vanderbilt University, and Southern Methodist University was asked<br />
“What experiences have you had in engineering/<strong>STEM</strong>” and “What have you done the past<br />
two summers” 21 in ten out of eleven of the applications. The University of Texas at Austin,<br />
which automatically admits students from public schools who are in the top 7 percent of<br />
their graduating class, however there is not automatic admittance into the Cockrell School<br />
of Engineering. A student must also have either an SAT Math score of 600, and ACT Math<br />
score of 26 or above, AB or BC Calculus Test score of 3 or higher, and IB mathematics<br />
HL or SL Examinations score of 4 or high, or a transcript from a college or university with<br />
credit for a college level Calculus I course with a grade of “C” or better 22 . Even a student<br />
who meets these requirements may not be accepted into the program 23 and most<br />
students need to show a higher than average performance in the areas of math and<br />
science. As the rewards of receiving a degree in <strong>STEM</strong> continue to grow, more incoming<br />
college students apply to school to be engineers, and the vetting process for those<br />
students is becoming increasing difficult – especially for students in rural communities who<br />
21<br />
This student was my brother<br />
22<br />
"Slurpee Straw Inspires Novel Innovation in Surgical Cleaning Tech." Cockrell School of Engineering. Accessed<br />
May 15, 2018. http://www.engr.utexas.edu/undergraduate/admissions/12-undergraduate/index.php.<br />
23<br />
I have anecdotal evidence of this – the valedictorian of my graduating class was not accepted in the Cockrell<br />
School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.<br />
17
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