Four main departments were established: blogging, tutoring, tech, and publicity. Under the blogging department, our writing team writes about various STEM-related topics ranging from psychology to COVID-19 to black holes. Our tutors and curriculum developers work on helping students prepare for stadardized tests and olympiad exams, study for classes, or explore a new science field. The tech team works to publish the weekly blogs and update the website with new information regarding our organization. Lastly, our graphics team creates flyers and posters to post on our social media platforms or send to schools that are interested in our program.
To concentrate growth in local areas and provide more students with leadership opportunities, InterSTEM established its chapter program. Chapters operate as semi-independent branches of the organization that, in addition to supporting the central tutoring and blogging departments, pursue their own initiatives, including workshops, guest speaker series, science contests, etc.
Fifteen students were chosen from over 70 applications to form four research groups in physics, biology, and machine learning. Led by InterSTEM’s CEO (Ryan) and COO (Min), these students attended several workshops on the scientific research process before tackling their own research projects. By the conclusion of this program in April of 2021, each group will publish a research paper, final presentation, and several blog posts revolving around their topic.
InterSTEM’s YouTube channel hosts recordings of all of our guest speaker lectures, podcast episodes, video courses, and more! New content is published on a regular basis by the executive board, with contributions from many of our chapters.
Over twenty elementary and high school students competed in InterSTEM’s first competition, writing an article about a scientist or scientific discovery of their choice. The executive board individually judged all submissions and gave scores and comments based on the rubric available on the competition submission form. $200 in prizes were awarded to the top three submissions, and after a round of revisions, the best articles were published.
As a continuation of our first writing contest, InterSTEM held two writing workshops to help elementary students improve their skills in academic writing. By having discussions with their peers and mentors and participating in writing activities about precise sentences and various sentence structures, students wrote an article about a STEM-related topic of their choice.
Students will have a chance to learn the art of coding (Ex. Java) from experienced teachers and create a final project at the end using the knowledge gained from the program.
People will have a chance to ask questions to accomplished seniors/college students regarding their major, school, academic interests, etc.
Currently, there are several teams that are each working under a field of interest; some is working in computer science. Other are working on phyiscs or computational biology. There are many different options!