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How are some non-profit hospitals more profitable than others?  My medical school curriculum includes a class called the “Business of Medicine,” where we learn about different payment systems in the healthcare industry. My school’s affiliated hospital, Northwestern Memorial, seems to have the business aspect of medicine down pat, as it ranks among the most profitable hospitals in the US. Meanwhile, just 11 miles away on the South Side of Chicago, South Shore is one of several neighboring hospitals that recently announced financial struggles. Both Northwestern Memorial and South Shore are non-profit institutions. How is it that some non-profit hospitals are so much more profitable than others?
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Peeking behind the curtain of running an outreach program  STEMM outreach is an essential component of STEMM community engagement, education, and science communications. There’s a lot of strategy and finesse in translating scientific principles into captivating demonstrations. However, there are additional challenges that many don’t know about when it comes to running STEMM outreach with social justice-oriented missions, ones that target audiences from disadvantaged or marginalized backgrounds for sustained engagement.
Here, I continue a conversation with two friends I’ve worked closely with to talk about the unique challenges of running an outreach program that targets students from marginalized communities. Check out part 1 where we cover topics including challenges of reaching middle school students, parental effects on STEMM enthusiasm, sustained community engagement, and motivations for getting into STEMM outreach. Now in part 2, we cover challenges in reflecting diversity in volunteers, soliciting financial support, fostering art and creativity in STEMM, and advice on working in STEMM outreach. Murchtricia Jones, Sydney Rosenblum, and I worked together as directors for the University of Michigan’s InnoWorks chapter, an organization that puts together week-long summer camps for socioeconomically disadvantaged middle school students. Murchtricia is a PhD candidate in bioinformatics; Murchtricia re-started the organization after a long institutional hiatus and served as the executive director for three years. Sydney Rosenblum is the current director of U-MyScI, the rebranded InnoWorks chapter, and previously served as the logistics director for two years. STEMM outreach with socioeconomically disadvantaged students  STEMM outreach is an essential component of STEMM community engagement, education, and science communications. There’s a lot of strategy and finesse in translating scientific principles into captivating demonstrations. However, there are additional challenges that many don’t know about when it comes to running STEMM outreach with social justice-oriented missions, ones that target audiences from disadvantaged or marginalized backgrounds for sustained engagement.
In this interview, I chatted with two friends I’ve worked with closely in STEMM outreach to talk about the unique challenges of running an outreach program that targets students from marginalized communities. In part 1, we cover topics including challenges of reaching middle school students, parental effects on STEMM enthusiasm, sustained community engagement, and motivations for getting into STEMM outreach. Check out part 2 on the importance of art in STEMM and reflecting diversity in volunteers! Murchtricia Jones, Sydney Rosenblum, and I worked together as directors for the University of Michigan’s InnoWorks chapter, an organization that puts together week-long summer camps for socioeconomically disadvantaged middle school students. Murchtricia is a PhD candidate in bioinformatics; Murchtricia re-started the organization after a long institutional hiatus and served as the executive director for three years. Sydney Rosenblum is the current director of U-MyScI, the rebranded InnoWorks chapter, and previously served as the logistics director for two years.  Feminism has played a key role in framing inequality within STEM communities, particularly with regard to the stories about gender disparities shared through #WomeninSTEM. However, the visible and most commonly shared stories of diversity in STEMM are largely centered on the experiences and achievements of white, cisgender, and able-bodied women. Women’s history month is not only a great time to register the advances of women in STEM fields, but also to reconcile how STEMinism (STEMM x feminism) can be more inclusive and intersectional.
re: STEM is a space to discuss the inner workings of the scientific community as well as the global impact of science and technology. However, there are always ways that this space is limited or as I’ll call them, “points of tension,” in which re: STEM and myself are limited in connecting social justice and STEMM.
And why re: STEM exists!  Throughout my academic coursework, my science teachers and professors repeatedly emphasized the importance of the technical side of these disciplines and content expertise. They demonstrated the elegance in how equations can be solved or how formulas can be derived and expanded. And yet in doubling down in technical content expertise, I rarely learned about how the sciences and math impacted the world I lived in on a daily basis. I experienced, whether my teachers intended to or not, the enforcement of social-technical divisions in which STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) fields divorce themselves from the ways the world and societies are impacted by scientific production. Social justice is crucial for rectifying the power of STEMM in shaping global geo-political and technical landscapes with the responsibility of equitable power distribution.
Why faculty should care about student mental health welfare and how faculty can help. In the visible and vocal wings of STEMM, communities in academic institutions have strived to and struggled to cope with the growing mental health crisis. Numerous think pieces have contemplated how this crisis is getting worse throughout U.S. graduate schools, often citing how graduate students are six times more likely to experience depression and anxiety when compared to the general public. This epidemic is indiscriminate to age, geographical location, field of study, and degree level, though each combination of variables presents unique challenges to be addressed. Across countless institutions, administrators have held task forces, focus groups, wellness lectures, and presented recommendations to department heads and regents. Meanwhile, students of all degree types have organized in unions, held demonstrations, and commiserate by connecting through articles and memes. But key players with stakes in this mental health crisis are seemingly less loud, often hidden or even missing entirely: what are faculty up to in this epidemic?
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