I am writing this letter to you after presenting to your Kindergarten classmates what I do for a living. You introduced me as a “publisher” to your classmates, but I am more of a writer than anything else. The “aha” moment for me that day had nothing to do with my presentation, but everything to do with what happened next. It was when your teacher, Mrs. Timpson, announced that “ants” would be the next topic for the class to cover. She announced to you, and the three girls who had stayed after class to talk about the next day’s assignments, that “it’s time for the teacher's favorite subject: Science!”

Dear Ms. Hart,
I fell in love with your video series “Doodling in Math Class” the moment I saw it. My friend Evan sent me a link, commenting that he wished his students would do things like this. And there it was: a triangle party. Triangles are one of my favorite things in math. Like you noted in your video, the angles are dependent on each other for how big they can be. Every time I have been faced with a blank piece of notebook paper in the past month, I have found myself doodling triangles, in conga lines and piling on top of each other.

I can’t remember any science experiences outside of the school setting but as a young child I knew I wanted to be a scientist. Of most of my memories, I can only remember them if I connect them with my school experiences. For instance, I can’t recall how old I was when my grandmother passed away, but I remember I was in my second grade. Similarly I remember I was in the third grade when I decided to become a physicist.

Researchers know that breast cancer affects African American women differently from Caucasian women, but they don’t know the exact reasons why.

The difference is one puzzle that researchers with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Tissue Bank at IU Simon Cancer Center, located in Indianapolis, are hoping to figure out by encouraging women, especially minority women, to donate a breast tissue and blood sample.

The National Alliance for Partnership in Equity Education Foundation (NAPE-EF), the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), and the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) will partner to launch the Educators' Equity STEM Academy in an effort to increase recruitment, academic performance, and program completion of women and underrepresented students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses and careers.

I encourage young people or not so young people to consider a science career. Computer Science was not my first career, child development was.  After working in child development for 12 years and hardly being able to provide for myself and son as a single parent, I went back to college for a second bachelor's degree in computer science.

I would be lying if Steve Jobs didn’t influence my life. I remember being in high school and hating computers. I didn’t quite understand them. All the technical terms confused me and I just felt like a fish out of water. I knew then and there that I wanted to stay away from computers as much as I can.

Tomorrow, October 6, at 12PM ET, 11AM CT,10AM MT, 9AM PT, the STEM Equity Pipeline is sponsoring a free webinar titled Race/Ethnicity matters when recruiting, retaining undergraduate women engineers. The webinar will be presented by Elizabeth Litzler, PhD, Director for Research, Center for Workforce Development at the University of Washington.