Presenter: Tina Li, Business Marketing, Global Public Health Scholars
For my practicum, I worked with the nonprofit organization SciTech2U, which is an after-school program providing affordable and accessible STEAM education to at-risk, minority, and immigrant students k-12. I worked with my team and connected with SciTech2U on campus through a business club called Consult Your Community, which aims to consult small businesses and nonprofits in the local area. My team and I mainly focused on increasing SciTech2U’s social media activity, establishing a club at a local high school, and researching funding opportunities. We would meet biweekly with the founder, Zainab Abbas, and present her with updates on our progress. She would provide us with feedback and suggestions, as well as assign us new tasks. Although I did not work directly with the students, as a business major, the behind-the-scenes work is something more relevant to my major while still promoting public educational health. The purpose of my work was to contribute toward targeting racial minority students in STEAM education within the United States. The goal of helping SciTech2U is to
address the imbalance of educational opportunity between minority families, who are highly associated with lower income, and nonminority students associated with higher income. Increasing their activity in social media helped branch out to more families, providing greater accessibility to STEAM education, and researching how to increase funds contributed to greater affordability. These actions also increase total awareness of the educational disparity within minority and lower-income communities. From working with SciTech2U, not only did I gain experience in business consulting, I also learned more about the small differences which contribute to this disparity. For instance, minority students residing in lower-income communities do not have a consistent means of transportation to after-school programs, extracurricular education is often too expensive, and these students do not always have the best exposure to STEAM education. Tackling these small issues one at a time can effectively help with contributing to the overall public health problem of the educational gap in the U.S.