Hello and welcome. My name is Cindy and I'm a researcher and project manager at the [Griffin] Museum of Science and Industry Chicago. You're listening to an episode of our series, "Transition Points: Snapshots of a STEM Journey." "Transition Points" is a series of podcasts, briefs, and blog posts that we've created in order to share some of the insights from our longitudinal study, The Developing YOUth! Project.

This project follows alumni from our legacy teen program here at the Museum. That teen program was called the Science Minors and Achievers. The project is mixed methods and has a quantitative component which includes our annual surveys as well as a qualitative component. The qualitative methods we used include participant observations from when the teens were still in the program as well as in-depth 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. For a few more details about the project and series overall, take a listen to our introductory episode.

When talking to our participants about what they liked about their time at the Museum, they consistently told us, "It's the people." In another episode, we discuss how staff helped to facilitate a supportive space for our teens in the program. In this episode, however, we're going to talk about how their peers at the Museum helped to foster a positive and inclusive peer culture. We then talk about how some of their experiences with peer groups changed after leaving the program, when they were in college.

At [Griffin] MSI

Most Achievers described the peer culture in the Museum as quite positive, which contributed to the supportive environment they felt they had here. Participants appreciated the diversity they found in the program as well as the commonalities they discovered amongst that diversity.

Achievers often commented that peers in the program were extremely diverse in terms of their gender, racial and ethnic identities, religion, socioeconomic status, family immigration status, school experience (that is public, private, or homeschooled), and the areas in which they lived (that is urban, suburban, or rural). Participants were happy to find that within the diversity they could see amongst themselves, they also found a common attitude towards learning and teaching science. In particular, some participants felt that this was the first time they’d been surrounded by peers who shared the same ambitions and attitudes towards science as themselves. Youth repeatedly described the culture of the Science Minors and Achievers program as accepting and inclusive. Some of the participants commented that they believed the diversity of the youth in the program helped to create that culture. 

A lot of people in the suburbs stay in the suburbs and a lot of people from the city stay in the city. And so for me, and of course this is an over-generalization, to be able to go into the city and interact with kids from all over the city, from the northside to the southside to the south suburbs to the north suburbs. I mean that really kinda opened my eyes to a world that was greater than the world that I had been raised in. By coming together with kids from all different races and backgrounds and socioeconomic classes, that really helped me understand people’s backgrounds and keep more of an open mind that I wouldn’t have gotten in elementary school or high school, because everyone in my town was exactly like me, well, not exactly like me, but very similar to me. I think the Achiever’s program gave me a better understanding of people and who they are and how to interact with people that aren’t me or aren’t from the same background as me or the same area as me. So, that’s some definitely something that I’ve been able to enjoy, as I’ve grown older is that not everyone is me so you can’t treat everyone the same way that I would like treat myself or my direct friends. 

In College

The same youth, however, had different experiences in college outside of the [Griffin] MSI community. Emma identifies as a Black African-American woman and majored in Computer Science at a large public university. She joined and was active in multiple student organizations for Black Students in STEM at her college, which she described as mostly helpful earlier in her college years. While Emma did find some supportive peer and mentor networks within these organizations, the classes in her major lacked diversity and were predominantly white.

EMMA: Being like, the only Black woman in my class or sometimes the only Black person, I think that I was kind of expecting that, but I didn't realize how isolated I would feel until like, I was actually in those situations...

Emma's response was to normalize the experience.

I think that... I don't know. I just kind of like, just put my head down and did what I had to do. I try not to think about it too much, because it just didn't go away. Like, it just became the normal for me. Because like in my instance, sometimes I'm the only woman on my entire team, or the only Black person on their entire team and so-or both, usually both. It just became normal for me. And it was familiar, like the feeling of being isolated, or like being alone, that was familiar to me. And so after a while, I just didn't even process it as much as I did in the beginning.

Emma went on to share with us how the isolation she felt affected her academic experience:

In my opinion, I was just a little bit behind so I just had to work a little bit harder than I saw other students working. On top of that, the other kids, they had study groups and things of that sort. And, for me, it was very hard to find people that I connected to who were also in my major. And so, I mainly did all my homework... I pretty-well I never had a study group, to be honest. And the only time I ever worked with another person was in office hours with my professor or the TA's or something like that. So I think that having to navigate that experience by myself, for the most part, [was] really, like challenging and stressful.

At the time of our interview, Emma had recently graduated and was on the job market, looking for a position as a software engineer. She was unenthusiastic about her career prospects, explaining that she was passionate about art, creativity, and community-building, but that she rarely encountered and did not expect to find positions that allowed her to do what she loved within her expertise as a software engineer.

On the other hand, some participants had a much easier time in their engineering programs. They described being able to find and form peer groups that could support them through their rigorous coursework. I talked to Ray, a Jewish man whose family immigrated to the US from South America when he was very young. Ray indicated to me that he passes for a white man and benefits from the privileges that come with it.

I asked him about forming study groups during his time in the school of engineering and he said:

RAY: I learned the value of just on the first day of class being like, Hey, I'm making a group chat. Who wants to join in? Yeah. I can't tell you, how many times this has saved me? You know, because not only do people meet up to study, and do like that, but you know, when you're doing homework, someone's like, hey, then he has who has number seven? And some guys like, I have number seven. Another guy's like, I have number seven. Like let's compare answers. And then you do that. And then oh, my God, it is so useful to do that. Seniors, my last semester of college, I got a math minor in college. And for some reason, I decided to take elementary number theory, its called elementary theory of numbers, it was number theory. I think I got this the seed by the fact of the name Elementary, the name thinking it was gonna be easy. It was, it was the hardest classes I've taken. Wow. Oh, it was kind of small. But I just that whole make a group chat thing. And we would and to do every single homework, we would meet for a couple hours. And like, you could rent these little sort of cubicles, or meeting rooms, a library, we’d meet there. And we would kind of hammer out the homework, which was great, because I would not have, like passed that class otherwise. [...] Making groups has helped me a lot in college. I couldn't have done it without making these groups.

Like Emma, Ray and Cam were in rigorous Engineering programs at large state universities. Cam's perspective on peer networks within the school of engineering was similar to Ray's perspective. Cam, who identifies as a white man, explained the impossibility of getting through such a rigorous program without a supportive peer group-something Emma explained was exactly her experience.

CAM: I wouldn't have been able to get through it. Like, if I had no friends, if I was by myself, there's no way. It would be impossible to get through it. Yeah. Like it's like basically, you're working with these people so closely, and everyone's going to each other with questions like there's just no way you could do it by yourself. Freshman and sophomore year I didn’t have a lot of friends so I was like working by myself a lot. It was so hard. By the time I got to junior year, people realized you either had to make friends or you’re screwed. So people started working together. Even sometimes you’d be working with people you didn’t even know. People would come up to you and they would see what you’re working on and they’d be like ‘hey are you in this class?’ and you’re like ‘yeah’, and they’d sit next to you and you’d start working on it with them. Yeah, you can’t do it by yourself. 

Many of our participants were in school during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the corresponding periods of remote learning. Talking to participants about these experiences presented us with an interesting natural experiment. Participants like Cam experienced the contrast between having a strong peer network within his major during undergrad to having to do much of his Master's in Mechanical Engineering program in isolation. I asked him about this shift.

CAM: Yeah, it's definitely a lot harder. I mean, even like for general stuff, like your homework, like, obviously, like even professors and stuff, encourage working with other people on homework, I guess kind of what our workload is like, but it's just the thing with like, COVID is, since all of our classes were in person in the new program, I didn't know anyone because only people the only person I knew was my roommate. So like we stuck together, but I didn't know anyone else. So like it was just me and him. Working on this stuff together, it's definitely a lot harder because like in undergrad, we'd have like a whole group of people like five or six my friends. And we would always like go to the computer labs and the engineering buildings and work on stuff together and ask each other if we had questions and stuff like that. But it’s way different now. It’s definitely worse.

Implications

Participants in the Science Minors and Achievers program valued the diversity they found at the Museum. However, for many that kind of diversity was absent in the colleges they attended. Instead of finding a home with their peers, they felt alone and isolated. Some changed schools, some changed majors, and some stuck with it but graduated with less optimism and enthusiasm for STEM and for their future as a whole.

Positive youth development (PYD) programs focus on the positive aspects of what youth bring to an experience and what they can achieve. However, more work may need to be done to prepare them for situations without the kind of scaffolded support Positive Youth Development programs, like the Science Minors and Achievers program, offer. Certainly, more research needs to be done about the transition from high school to college for these young adults.

Conclusion

While in this episode we compared how Achievers felt about their peers within [Griffin] MSI and then some of their experiences with peer groups in college. In another episode, we go into how Achievers felt staff in the program helped to provide a supportive community. We also get into how this type of support may have been lacking for some participants in college.

In our episode on belonging, we discuss more broadly, a sense of belonging to communities inside and outside of the Museum. In that episode we dig deeper into how feeling a sense of belonging to communities, or rather, feeling the absence of this, affected some of our Black Women-identifying participants in particular. We focused on these participants because of the stark contrast between their experiences in college, and the experiences our participants described while in the Science Minors and Achievers program. 

Our episode on skill building for success, focuses more on how other features of the program helped participants to build skills that set them apart from their peers in college or in their careers. In our episode on meaningful opportunities, we'll talk a little bit more about how our participants felt they were able to use science education to impact their communities.