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NYU labs help diversify STEM fields

By Sophie Gao

Standing before a roundtable of 13 high school, college and graduate students considering careers in engineering, Ollintzin Mortera explained his latest three-dimensional design. 

“I’m working on inter-meshed steel connections. And we’re basically modeling it and making it scalable, so we can use it in different applications, like robotics. And so that we can also share with our peers around the world,” said Mortera, who will be a junior at Brooklyn Technical High School in the fall. 

Mortera is one of 65 students in NYU’s seven-week Applied Research and Innovation in Science and Engineering (ARISE) program. Since 2014, ARISE has allowed more than 400 New York City high school students to do hands-on lab research in fields ranging from anthropology to biology to six types of engineering with professors at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences and Tandon School of Engineering. ARISE selected those 65 from 950 applicants. 

ARISE especially targets students from high schools without enough access to science, technology, engineering and math instruction and other STEM programming. 

“What we’re really contributing to the STEM enterprise is intellectual diversity,” said Benjamin Esner, who has directed NYU Tandon’s Center for K-12 STEM Education, which oversees ARISE, for 11 years. 

“Ethnic and racial diversity, for sure,” he added. “Gender diversity, absolutely. You know, these are all the things that actually make science effective and great.”

Analyzing 9 million papers and the work of 6 million scientists worldwide, a 2018 study by the Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi concluded that work done by ethnically diverse groups were more often to be cited by other researchers and scientific publications.

Accordingly, ARISE students are an “eclectic group of kids,” said Debra Laefer, whose Urban Modeling Group has participated in ARISE since 2018. She has hosted students who had previously done considerable research in STEM and those who had not, those from wealthy families and those from impoverished ones.

Laefer recalled, in particular, a student whose family immigrated to the United States from Southeast Asia and owned an electronics repair shop in Flushing, Queens. A representative from the Pinkerton Foundation, which helps fund ARISE, visited her lab. Laefer recalled that the representative “asked our students one by one, ‘What is the greatest thing about this program?’ And the student said, ‘This is the first time in my life I’ve ever had my own desk.’” 

ARISE pays each participant a $750 stipend at the end of the program. It does not implement a grade point average cutoff or require advanced STEM courses, according to the program website.

These advanced courses are often unavailable to students who attend schools where over 75% of the student body is in poverty, said a report by the Educational Commission of the States. 

Though 40% of Black and Latino students stated an interest in STEM fields, 3% took Advanced Placement STEM classes during the 2019-20 school year, according to Equal Opportunity Schools’  2022 survey of 200,000 high school students across 184 schools nationwide.

What ties ARISE students together is their curiosity and passion, demonstrated through an essay and interview process, said Fraida Fund, who has worked with ARISE students in Tandon’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department since 2014. “Research is the process of … spending a long time pushing really, really hard against the wall of human knowledge until you make the tiniest little bump in it,” she said. “Pushing at that wall for weeks is frustrating –– a student who isn’t motivated or excited or curious is just going to be miserable.”

For admitted students, the program is “very rewarding,” Mortera, the student, said. “It’s definitely a huge learning experience for me and I’ve gained a lot of knowledge.” 

University of Pennsylvania biology major Luisa Valdez, who attended the program virtually in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, agreed with Mortera, applauding ARISE’s efforts to diversify the STEM fields. “Being in a space with other people passionate about STEM, including other minorities, was very impactful,” she said. “It helped me see that there is space for Afro-Latinas like myself in the sciences.”

Students are not the only beneficiaries of the program. For laboratory mentors, ARISE is an opportunity to explore topics that do not necessarily result in a publication or “academic credit,” the way a graduate project must, said Fund, from the electrical and computer department. Her lab, for instance, works on developing computer networks with limited delay in processing. Her two ARISE students are exploring different types of computing that might contribute to that delay, a project that “isn’t a core part of our research, but is part of this big puzzle we’re working on overall.” She described this exploration as “more exciting proof-of-concept” work, something she “really enjoys” for its deviation from traditional, publication-driven lab work.

Laefer said mentorship, by its very nature, is rewarding. “It’s a really easy way to have a very positive impact on people,” she said. “Particularly for underrepresented groups –– women, or otherwise. They just don’t know about things sometimes. This is to give them the opportunity to just walk in the door and say, ‘Oh gosh, I didn’t know there was this.’”