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Take time to Explore at least 3 career choices from the resources below. How do you See Yourself in STEM/STEAM?
Discuss some of your top choices or interests and share in the last column of the Padlet!

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Weekly Classroom Conversations with Professionals

Give your students the opportunity to hear from a diverse group of people using computer science to explore the universe, make cool robots and popular TV shows, and more! Students will learn about a number of ways they can use computer science to have a positive impact, as well as different journeys that people have taken to get to meaningful careers and achieve their goals. For classes joining live, there may be opportunities for Q&A.

Live, weekly conversations

Recordings will be available

Developing responsible artificial intelligence

Wednesday, September 22nd at 10 am EDT

Recommended for grades K-5

Learn how one program manager works with scientists and engineers to help build new technologies responsibly.

About the speaker:
As a program manager on Google's Responsible AI team, Taylor Roper works with a lot of amazing research scientists, software engineers, and others to develop and manage tools, processes, and programs to help Google's teams develop AI responsibly. Taylor is an alumna of Howard University, graduating in 2020 with a B.B.A. in Information Systems.

Artificial intelligence and sports

Wednesday, September 29th at 1 pm EDT

Recommended for grades 6-12

Learn how a former semi-pro soccer player combined his love for sports and his interest in artificial intelligence into a career using data to help athletes and teams improve their performance.

About the speaker:
Patrick Lucey serves as Chief Scientist at Stats PERFORM. Previously, Patrick was at Disney Research, where he conducted research into automatic sports broadcasting. His main research interests are in artificial intelligence and interactive machine learning in sporting domains. For more background, please check out Patrick's personal page.

Building models of the universe

Wednesday, October 6th at 9 am EDT

Recommended for grades K-5

Hear from two NASA scientists about their career journeys and how they use data science to build 3D models of the universe.

About the speakers:
Kim Arcand was working in molecular biology and public health when she was hired for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1998. Since she always wanted to be an astronaut when she was little, this opportunity got Kim close to the cosmos but without the long distance commute. Today, Kim uses data to tell stories about science, whether in the form of a 3D print of an exploded star or a Virtual Reality application for high-energy astrophysics. For more background, please check out Kim's personal page.

Rutuparna Das is an astrophysicist and science communicator at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Through research, she weighs clusters of galaxies to figure out what the cosmos is made of. Through NASA's Universe of Learning, she spreads the joys of space in a variety of ways, including telling stories about the people behind the science.

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taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Computer science for good

Thursday, October 14th at 11 am EDT

Recommended for grades 6-12

Learn how two software engineers took different paths into the same career, and are now building technology that helps students all around the world learn computer science.

About the speakers:
With an academic background in neuroscience and education, Erin Bond was previously an elementary school teacher and private learning specialist. She is a graduate of Ada Developers Academy and is excited to blend her long-term dedication to education and new-found interest in technology at Code.org.

Maureen Sturgeon is a Software Engineer at Code.org. She didn't discover computer science until college and is passionate about expanding access to computer science for K-12 students. Maureen graduated from Western Washington University with a B.S. in Mathematics. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, traveling and watching stand-up comedy.

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taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Building robots

Friday, October 22nd at 9 am EDT

Recommended for grades K-5

Learn how two women are helping build software for robots and designing learning experiences that inspire the next generation of technologists.

About the speakers:
Anna Elzer is a learning designer at iRobot Education. Her experiences as an educator, artist, and community builder continue to fuel her passion for equity, creativity, and youth voice. She is committed to making robotics accessible to young people, educators, and anyone who is curious to learn! In her free time, Anna loves playing volleyball, salsa dancing, and making art with friends.

As Director of Software Engineering at iRobot, Eva Moscat is responsible for the Robot Operating System department, including connectivity, embedded Linux, manufacturing, and engineering tools. Eva is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic; through her culture and socioeconomic upbringing, she mentors children with a similar background in STEM. Eva is inspired daily by her husband and her newborn son. In her free time, she enjoys watching anime, playing basketball, and building her sneaker collection.

Register on Eventbrite
By clicking above, you will be
taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Building the Internet of Things

Wednesday, October 27th at 9 am EDT

Recommended for grades 6-12

Learn about how one solutions architect is helping to build the Internet of Things - and hosting Twitch streams!

About the speaker:
Olawale Oladehin is the Head of Worldwide Solutions Architects - IoT (Internet of Things) at Amazon. He has 15 years of experience working across ecommerce, video, and embedded systems. He has a passion for helping customers innovate through technology to achieve their business outcomes. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Princeton University.

Register on Eventbrite
By clicking above, you will be
taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Making Star Wars

Friday, November 5th at 11 am EDT

Recommended for grades K-5

Hear how two computer science graduates use technology to help make movies and TV shows, including the many worlds of Star Wars.

About the speakers:
Cristiane Teles Maia was born in São Paulo, Brazil and moved to New York when she was nine years old. Since joining Industrial Light & Magic in 2015, she has worked as a render support technical assistant on the Star Wars films, and also served as a resource assistant on several other works including Deepwater Horizon. Recently she's taken on new challenges as an external assistant technical director while working on The Mandalorian and various other projects.

Ini Oladosu joined Industrial Light & Magic in 2020 as a Production Assistant. He was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria before immigrating to Calgary, Canada with his family in 2000. Between 2019 and 2021, Ini co-wrote and co-produced his debut short film, Framed. The film has been selected into various film festivals and most recently won the award for Best Edit at the 2021 London International Monthly Film Festival.

Register on Eventbrite
By clicking above, you will be
taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Using Roblox to empower students

Wednesday, November 10th at 1 pm EDT

Recommended for grades 6-12

Learn how one Roblox designer uses the platform to empower students to pursue careers as entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers.

About the speaker:
As the senior instruction designer for Roblox, Genevieve Johnson oversees the creation of educational content and empowers students to pursue careers as entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers. She has been an author on two books, Roblox Game Development in 24 Hours: The Official Roblox Guide, and Coding with Roblox Lua in 24 Hours: The Official Roblox Guide.

Register on Eventbrite
By clicking above, you will be
taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Art + Tech

Friday, November 19th at 11 am EDT

Recommended for grades K-5

Learn how the program team at LA County Museum of Art makes space for artists to explore the intersections of art and emerging technologies.

About the speakers:
Since Joel Ferree became program director of LACMA's Art + Technology Lab in 2015, the Lab has cemented its reputation as one of the world's leading initiatives that connects artists with innovators in technology. Previous and current projects have involved artists working on projects with both NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and SpaceX, and with companies working across machine-learning, robotics and 3D-printing and more.

Tomas Garcia is LACMA 's Assistant Vice President of Technology and Digital Media, guiding the digital vision of one of the nation's pioneering arts institutions. In this capacity he leads the digital operations of a diverse, multi-generational workforce while materializing the groundwork for the future of technology in museums. Tomas is responsible for the design and management of digital touchpoints all across the institution.

Register on Eventbrite
By clicking above, you will be
taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Visual storytelling with data

Wednesday, December 1st at 1 pm EDT

Recommended for grades 6-12

Learn how a creative technologist uses art, music, data, and technology to create experiential software that both helps scientists and inspires people of all ages.

About the speaker:
Sasha Samochina (sam-ocean-uh) is the Director of Labs at Moving Brands, a creative and innovation company that explores emerging technologies. She formerly led the Data Visualization and Infusion team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With a background in art, Sasha creates software that incorporates innovative forms of visualization that aid scientists, engineers, and astronauts. For more background, please check out Sasha's personal page.

Register on Eventbrite
By clicking above, you will be
taken to www.eventbrite.com.
Teacher Guides

The My Journey Chats for K-5 students differ from those for middle and high school students in subject matter. We strongly encourage you to sign your class up for Chats that are appropriate for your grade band. To learn more about key takeaways for students and suggestions for planning, view the Teacher Guide that's most appropriate to you.
What's in the guides:

Student Takeaways / Guiding Principles

Before the My Journey Chat

After the My Journey Chat

Go further: Suggestions for extended learning

Frequently Asked Questions

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Give your students the opportunity to hear from a diverse group of people using computer science to explore the universe, make cool robots and popular TV shows, and more! Students will learn about a number of ways they can use computer science to have a positive impact, as well as different journeys that people have taken to get to meaningful careers and achieve their goals.

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Roadtrip Nation | Find your career roadmap

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Explore your career options and find professions that match your interests by reading about how inspiring people started doing what they do.

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Catherine Zhou manages the data science team at Codecademy. She's been working at Codecademy for 3 years and as a data scientist for ten. Because the job title of "Data Scientist" is relatively new, Catherine's title has ranged over the years from quant to researcher to business intelligence analyst to engineer - but through it all she's been doing the work in the field that's known today as "Data Science."

If you're not sure what a data scientist does, you're not alone. In an interview with Lil from the Codecademy Community Team, Catherine shares:

"I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what data science is, what skills it takes to be a data scientist, and the role of data scientists in the workplace. Data science, as it exists today, is a pretty amorphous space. This can cause confusion and mismatched expectations between data scientists and non-data scientists."

"It also can lead to imposter syndrome and confusion about career trajectory (I talk to so many people working in data science who aren't sure if they can call themselves data scientists!). I'm optimistic that this will improve over time, but in the meantime, a big part of my job includes educating others about the field of data science and aligning on expectations."

In this article, Catherine provides some insight into the world of data science, talks about her day to day, and helps us answer the elusive question, "What does a data scientist do?"

But first... what is data science?

The first step to understanding what a data scientist does is to understand what data science is. The following definition comes straight out of Code Foundations, a Codecademy Career Path designed to provide an overview of the main applications of programming.

"Data gives us information about the way the world works. And information can carry meaning - from a click telling us what someone likes, to toxins in the water signaling a health concern. But data is meaningless unless we do something with it. That's where data science comes in.

"Data science enables us to take data and transform it into meaningful information that can help us make decisions. Data science is interdisciplinary and combines other well-known fields such as probability, statistics, analytics, and computer science. The work that you might do could range from writing up reports to building machine learning models. No matter what your interests are, data science is applicable - because these days, we have data on everything!"

What does a data scientist do?

In our interview with Catherine, she explains the skills required for data scientists. "Data science is defined as sort of the intersection between statistics, software engineering, and domain or business knowledge. So you have to have a little bit of coding skills, a little bit of statistics skills, and a little bit of knowledge about your business."

Catherine says she thinks the piece of data science that's the most overlooked is the business or domain side. As a data scientist, you'll be working with specific stakeholders, teams, or parts of an organization to use data to help them achieve their goals or answer their questions.

"A lot of companies are trying to figure out how best to integrate data people into their organizations." As a result, there's a wide range of ways that data scientists may work with strategy, decision making, and implementation of analysis - and, as you can imagine, the role of a data scientist may look very different depending upon what company you're working on and what business domain you're working in!

What skills do data scientists need?

That said, there are a number of skills that are shared by data scientists across the board. If you're thinking of becoming a data scientist you'll want to build your skillset in the following areas:

Descriptive and inferential statistics

Probability

Programming (Specifically SQL, and Python or R)

A passion for diving deep into the data for the specific field you plan to work in

Of course, there's a whole lot to learn in each of these areas. But Catherine explains that you shouldn't feel like you have to learn it all:

"I'm always humbled by how much more I have to learn. Originally when I broke into the field I felt really overwhelmed and felt a lot of imposter syndrome about having to learn a lot. But I realized that when you work in data analysis or statistics you end up specializing in one part of it.

"You might specialize in predictive analysis; you might specialize in reporting; you might specialize in machine learning or artificial intelligence. There are so many subsets - usually data scientists will focus on one thing and get really good at it."

A day in the life of a (remote) data scientist

In her interview with Lil, Catherine shared a glimpse into what a typical day looked like as a data scientist at Codecademy before we shifted to remote work. Here's an update on how that has changed in recent months, since we've started working remotely.

Growing the team while working from home

Data Science at Codecademy has grown a lot over the last few months, and we've added quite a few new team members. We started a few people right before we shut our offices down, and it's been a challenge figuring out how to shift their onboarding to virtual. As a manager, it's my job to make sure my team is feeling focused and engaged, which can be really tough during a pandemic. These days, I spend most of my time thinking about how to collaborate effectively through a crisis, and how I and the company can support our team and our learners. The hardest part is taking everything day by day, since we're not able to plan ahead.

Meetings and written communication

Meetings and communication play a bigger role in my day-to-day than ever before. The DS team gets together regularly to align on projects, share work, and hold virtual pair programming sessions. We try to document everything in writing these days, in order to make sure we're communicating effectively, and no decision is lost or unclear. We make sure we have write-ups on how-to wikis for debugging and investigations, results for experiments and analyses, team planning docs, and project plans. We do regular code review, and get together to demo and share work for feedback. Having great processes is time-consuming, but documenting knowledge well and having great processes will serve us well for years to come. In many ways, shifting to remote work allowed us to really think about what processes were working well and what wasn't, and being very intentional about our channels of communication and project prioritization.

Hands-on data science work

At most tech companies, technical managers are expected to do a mix of IC (individual contributor) and people management work. As a manager, I reserve about 20% of my time, or about one day a week, on hands-on data science work. Examples of projects we've worked on are: building a model on learner engagement and retention, redesigning our database and ETLs to improve speed/performance, building internal data tools for other teams, designing experiments and choosing the right statistical tests to evaluate results. Lately, our team has been spending a lot of time thinking about developing frameworks to scale Data Science work. This means we're automating work through scripting to make sure we're not doing repetitive or manual work.

Unplugging from work

Working effectively during a pandemic can be really difficult, and I try to have empathy for myself and my coworkers when trying to strike the right balance between work and home life. We're lucky to work in an industry and role that can be done from home. I adopted two cats, named Mu and Sigma after the normal distribution, and try to signal a close to my workday by playing with my cats, calling a friend, cooking dinner, or reading a book.

Is data science right for you?

When asked if she always wanted to be a data scientist, Catherine shared, "This might be weird, but I was also really into probabilistic thinking and used to think about how it applied to my day-to-day decisions. I would try to calculate things like: if I miss this traffic light, what are the chances I'll miss the next two lights? How much longer would that lengthen my commute?"

If you've found yourself trying to make similar calculations, are curious about analyzing human behavior, or get excited about using data to uncover interesting or surprising information, a career in data science may be in your future!
Our Data Scientist Career Path is designed to give you all the skills you need to become a data analyst, data scientist, or machine learning engineer. Learn more and get started here.

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Catherine Zhou manages the data science team at Codecademy. She's been working at Codecademy for 3 years and as a data scientist for ten. Because the job title of "Data Scientist" is relatively new, Catherine's title has ranged over the years from quant to researcher to business intelligence analyst to engineer - but through it all she's been doing the work in the field that's known today as "Data Science."

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With the Roadmap, view career paths that align with your interests. Features video interviews with more than 1,000 professionals and steps for getting started.

3-question assessment takes just a moment or two. Great for middle school and up.

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Explore the vast range of careers and fields that use computer science

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Jack-o-lanterns. Flying lanterns. Paper lanterns. There are so many different lanterns that can be found around the world. Not only do lanterns look beautiful, but they are also oftentimes used to celebrate cultural traditions. If you live in the United States, you have probably made a jack-o-lantern for Halloween. Can you think of others?

This is a perfect STEM/STEAM Challenge to use your engineering/math skills to build a frame, creative art skills for a design to cover the frame and add a circuit to light it up (science/technology).

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What's It Like to be an Engineer at Amazon?

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What's It Like to be an Engineer at Amazon?

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What's It Like to be an Engineer at Amazon?

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(This is an Optional Activity) Advisories can schedule themselves in the available time slots on the Google Doc.
Feel free to reach out to Diane or Kerry with questions.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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TECHNOLOchicas 4.0 Trailer - Meet our TECHNOLOchicas - ENG

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The Makerspace will have the materials needed and we'll lead your advisory through the activity with your support!

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Massachusetts STEM/STEAM WEEK:

Theme- SEE YOURSELF IN STEM

Watch the student panel video below.

Explore the STEAM careers

Check out the info & videos in the STEM careers column.

Share Column: Each advisory is asked to share how you "See Yourself in STEM/STEAM" by posting to the padlet in that column.

Join in the Festive Lantern Activity (optional)

View the Activity & Sign up to come down to the Makerspace during advisory times.

See Diane or Kerry with any questions!

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Make Your Own Lantern | Learning in the Making: Live!

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STUDENT PANEL: “See Yourself in STEM,” people to see themselves in STEM. 

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STUDENT PANEL: “See Yourself in STEM,” people to see themselves in STEM. 

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Women, people of color, first-generation students, low-income individuals, English language learners, and people with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM industries and make up an increasing portion of the overall workforce, but the demographics of STEM fields have remained largely the same. We need more young people to see themselves in STEM.

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As an advisory, share by adding a post in this column.
Options: Record a video or audio in Padlet or import the file.
Create a slide show and paste the link to share.
Sketch or create a photo to demonstrate your response.