Stories in STEM 

As part of our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative, Team Appreciate holds the Stories in STEM speaker series in order to facilitate conversation on difficult topics and foster a culture of inclusion and acceptance within our team and FIRST. We host guest speakers to share their perspectives and experiences with our team and plan to invite teams from other high schools in the future.

April 12, 2022

At our second Stories in STEM event of the 2021-22 season, we held a panel discussion with Kaveri Kotagari and Siyona Nayampally from Chaps4Change Club, an organization at Westlake High School that focuses on creating a place of discussion about student’s social issues, to facilitate discussion on personal heritage as well as the significance of national heritage months.

February 22, 2022

At our first Stories in STEM event of the 2021-22 season, we held a panel discussion with Mindy Gulati (Equity & Inclusion Consultant at Fundamental Advisory), Keely Denenberg (Marketing & Client Solutions at Orange Grove Consulting), Nnenna Nwagbo (Associate Solution Engineer at Tableau Software), and Dr. Richard Anthony Baker (Coordinator and Executive Director for Institutional Equity & EEO at Rice University) to facilitate discussion on gender disparity as well as precognitive gendered biases common in the workspace. For this event, we had prepared a series of questions based on the international women’s day theme of “Breaking the Bias,” where the speakers openly answered and built on each other’s experiences of biases and equality in their working environment and what improvements have been made to break these biases.

April 26, 2021

At our second Stories in STEM event, we collaborated with members of FRC team 5052 RoboLobos as well as Student Council Executive Boards from Westlake High School and Cedar Park High School. At this event, students came together to learn the steps in promoting a more inclusive culture at our high schools. We also discussed the initiatives that students from each of our Robotics teams and Student Council Organizations have in place to promote the values of EDI. Lastly, we had the opportunity to have Dr. Gooden back again as a guest speaker to give a brief message on how cross-ISD collaboration can help EDI initiatives on a larger scale.

February 3, 2021

At our first Stories in STEM event, we featured guest speakers Mrs. Rawlings and Dr. Gooden, the EDI supervisors of Eanes ISD, to speak to our team on the importance of inclusion in STEM education.  At this event, 81 of our team members learned about the process of changing our culture to be more inclusive; it’s not going to happen over night, and will take lots of time, patience, and determination in order to become permanent. An important factor in encouraging this change is to gain the support of school leaders, boards, and superintendents. Conversations regarding EDI have always been difficult because many people feel uncomfortable to discuss the differences among us.  However, we must strive to become comfortable with being uncomfortable and give people the space to speak their truth.