Columbia Medical School Offers Summer STEM Opportunities for Hundreds of Students
Each summer, classrooms that were emptied at the end of the spring semester are filled again with students learning about biomedical sciences. However, instead of being medical or graduate students, these students are younger secondary school and college students sometimes experiencing STEM for the first time.
Multiple Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons education opportunities, known as pipeline programs or “pathways,” help prepare students for a variety of possible career paths to pursue after high school and give college students the chance to learn from and work directly with Columbia’s most renowned researchers and scientists. Columbia offers pipeline programs throughout the year but most occur during the summer months when students are on break.
For faculty and researchers, pipeline programs bring a new generation of students into the world of STEM to experience the same joy of scientific discovery they found in their careers. This joy is what keeps the programs alive.
Last summer, the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative hosted a day of science for middle school girls from New Jersey. Witnessing the students in a real lab for the first time inspired CSCI scientists to continue the program this summer, says Barbara Corneo, director of the Columbia Stem Cell Core Facility, who organized the events with Joanna Smeeton, the H.K. Corning Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine Research.
“The excitement on the face of one of the girls, when she saw under the microscope her own cells from a buccal swab, was wonderful to witness. She was amazed that there were so many cells in her body. She knew it in theory, but she really didn’t know that in reality,” says Corneo.
“We won’t ever forget that joy. It’s the same I felt the first time I saw DNA in my first isolation experiment and that I feel now every time I see fibroblasts become pluripotent stem cells.”
This year, CSCI offered two events—one for middle schoolers and another for junior and senior high school students recruited from under-resourced New York City high schools and from backgrounds historically underrepresented in STEM fields.
Photos by Rudy Diaz/CUIMC Communications
For both events, Corneo and Smeeton worked closely with two community groups, STEAMpark and HYPOTHEkids, which provide educational opportunities to students throughout the year and select program attendees based on their interest in science and motivation.
Students participated in hands-on lab activities, listened to CSCI PhD students talk about their career paths and experiences in sciences, and heard from the Columbia admissions team about financial aid and the admissions process. Both last year's and this year’s programs were sponsored by ThermoFisher, Bristol Myers Squibb, Life Technologies, and PopSockets, which provided funding to donate portable microscopes to the students.
“Many of our lab members and volunteers talk about their ‘sticky’ memories from early encounters in science camps or enrichment in middle school,” says Smeeton. “We hope that these outreach days will provide those kinds of future memories to our program students and send them home thinking about a career in science.”
Smeeton and Corneo also know that a passion for science isn’t always enough to hatch a career.
“By introducing ourselves and our journeys, we show them how we each walked a different path to find a home in science,” Corneo says. “Many of us are the first in our families to have a career in science, so we recognize the need to open a window on the existing possibilities in this field.”
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Jul 15, 2024