Hello everyone, and welcome to our podcast series, Transition Points: Snapshots of a STEM Journey. In this episode I want to introduce you to the Transition Points series and give you a little bit of background on The Developing YOUth! Project, one of our research studies at the [Griffin] Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. My name is Cindy La Nguyen, and I am a researcher and project manager on our Research and Education Strategy team.
Project BG
The Developing YOUth! Project is a longitudinal study following alumni from our legacy teen program here at the Museum. That teen program was called the Science Minors and Achievers. The Developing YOUth! project has two components: The quantitative side including our annual survey; and a qualitative side, including participant observations while participants were still in the program, as well as in-depth interviews and follow-up interviews we've conducted with some participants over the years. We last interviewed our participants during the summer of 2021. Some of them were finishing up college, some were starting their careers, and some were pursuing graduate school.
Methods
I'd like to tell you all a little bit about our qualitative interview process. Most of our interview participants talked to us twice during that most recent round. The first time we talked to each person, it was pretty unstructured. I started out most interviews with a very open-ended question: So, what have you been up to since the last time you spoke to someone at the Museum?
Most participants ended up telling me about college and what that had been like so far. At this point, it had been 4 or 5 years since they graduated from high school so some of the people I spoke to were finishing up school or working in new jobs. After hearing about their current situation, I asked the participants more about their time at the Museum. It usually went something like this, "thinking back to your time at the Museum..."
For some folks, I didn't even have to finish that question because they were eager to tell me about what they remembered. Immediately after those interviews, I wrote down a bunch of notes - things I thought were interesting and what kind of follow up questions I had. During the second interview a few weeks later, I was able to ask them to tell me more about those interesting bits. The second interview was also nice because some participants thought of things they wanted to tell me but didn’t get a chance to during our first call. Overall, these were really insightful and a great way to get a more in-depth look at what some of our participants were going through from their own points of view. This is something that is super important to me as a researcher, but also to our Research and Education Strategy Team here at the Museum. A reminder, though to myself as well as to you, dear listener. These interviews and the insights we gain from them are merely snapshots into lives that are so much more complex than what can be conveyed in a 45 minute video call. They are frozen in time and in space. They’re the pieces that we can see within a greater context that we cannot possibly fathom or capture.
What is "Transition Points"?
With that in mind, let me tell you a little more about this series. Transition Points: Snapshots of a STEM Journey is a series we’ve created in order to share some of the insights we’ve gleaned from our study. As part of the series, we’ve put together 5 briefs based on the qualitative data we’ve gathered during the last few years of our study. In each of these briefs, we talk a little about what our participants experienced while in the program during high school and then some of their experiences as they transitioned into college and into the workforce. In addition, you’re listening to an accompanying podcast. In each episode, we’ll talk a little bit more about what our participants shared with us and discuss a little bit about how those experiences may speak to larger implications. There are five episodes in total, each covering a theme. Those themes are: Skill Building for Success; Meaningful Opportunities; Staff Facilitated Supportive Spaces;Positive Peer Culture; and Sense of Belonging. You can listen to these in any order. For more on each theme, please see our accompanying brief, as well as our episode script posted on our blog.
