Creating a Future STEM Pipeline through Exposure and Mentoring

These past few days, I spend time at a conference whose purpose was to expose high school and college students to biomedical and health professions. While at this conference I meet many bright young students that had an advantage over their peers, they were in an environment where they were learning about and meeting professionals in career paths of their interest.
As I was having conversations with some of my peers and colleagues who are stem professionals or have stem backgrounds and most of us realized that we had little or no exposure to people that were doing things that we were working in the fields we were interested in nor what a scientists, engineering, technology professional or mathematician really did. Although none of us regret our chosen career path, we realize that we may have made different decisions and how beneficial meeting and interacting with someone in our desired career path would have been.

Each day, we have an opportunity to meet and interact with K-12 students and college students. As you are having conversations with them about the things they are interested in, why don't you spend a few minutes talking about what you do and how you ended up doing it. Who knows, you may be having a conversation with a child that has an interest in pursuing a stem career. Or you may get a transform a child's mindset from pursuing a career in sports or entertainment to one that they can pursue by going to college and graduate school. When you meet those students, go ahead and give them your business card and tell them to feel free to contact you.

For those students who take you up on your offer to contact you after your initial conversation. Make time in your schedule to interact with them, listen to them and share your life experience. Many students need mentors, but aren't sure how to ask a person to be a mentor to them. So let the relationship form naturally over time and be a consistent older person in their life, that is vested in helping them grow , develop and succeed over time. If you thinking about it, we all are were we are today, because people who didn't have to invested and poured into our lives by being our mentors; so we owe it to those coming behind us to do the same thing for them.