5 Ways to Kickstart your STEM Career Before College
FIRST Robotics Team 1721, Tidal Force’s, 2019 robot for DESTINATION: DEEP SPACE. A team which I had the fortune of being a Lead Mentor of for a period of time.
There is so much competition nowadays. With most students having good grades, playing in sports, managing a job, and some leading their science olympiad team to a state championship, its hard to not feel a little bit insecure about your current college or internship resume.
Thankfully, I recognized this early on in my high school career and in turn, I began to invest more of my time into activities that would give me the highest competitive advantage. Not only did these things open doors for me (having an internship at an aerospace company even before my first fall semester of college), but they also provided me with valuable connections that I have maintained even into the middle portion of my career.
Are you in high school right now wondering how to be more competitive for college? Perhaps you are also wondering how to get an internship as early as you can so you can quit your job at the grocery store during the summer?
If that sounds like you, then I hope you keep reading.
In this article, I am going to introduce to you 5 ways on how to jumpstart your STEM career, even if you are still in high school.
🍎 AP Classes
If you are already trying to be as competitive as you can with your GPA and with college credits, then you are probably already taking AP Classes. In a nutshell, AP Classes, are classes that mimic college level courses.
They offer a couple of important benefits over other course levels. Firstly, they are a requirement to take an AP subject test, where a high score may afford you a college credit depending on the university. Secondly, depending on your school their grades are weighted higher than other levels - so an A in an AP course would have a higher GPA than an A in its lower level course.
Most importantly, AP courses give you the most amount of knowledge on their particular subject relative to other ones. The more knowledge, the better.
When considering future study and eventually career in a STEM field, there are some classes that you might want to prioritize over others, like AP Computer Science and AP Calculus, that will help you to build a foundation of relevant skills and knowledge.
🤖 FIRST Robotics
As an alumni of the program, I am probably (very) biased, but FIRST Robotics is full-stop, the best way to jumpstart your STEM career.
FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is an international organization founded by NH inventor Dean Kamen who’s mission is transform culture to look up to STEM role-models. In practice, this is done by effectively running a small business where a competition-ready robot is the product. In this “business” you have all of the typical functions that goes along with one: marketing, finance, engineering, operations, etc.
FIRST is different than other STEM-related clubs that you would find in school because it includes the element of mentorship from industry professionals. Some of my most fruitful networking contacts were established when I was in high school. These contacts eventually gave me with recommendations and opportunities to get an engineering internship at an aerospace company, even before starting my first semester in college. This was because FIRST provided an opportunity to learn and demonstrate technical skills that employers are seeking in their future employees.
In this program, you learn similar interpersonal skills that you would learn on a sports team, like teamwork and competition. However, as mentioned, you also learn technical skills that are used in STEM fields, like modeling, prototyping, and also learning from failure.
In the end, it’s more than just robots. Be on the look out for articles published about my experience in FIRST as a student, mentor, employee, and volunteer.
🧪 Personal Projects/Research
Similar to FIRST Robotics, but on a more individualized level, it’s important to show that you have passion for STEM projects. For this reason, I would recommend working on a personal project during your high school career.
Interviewers love hearing about how you formulated a project from an idea, taking it from a thought all the way through to a finished and communicated piece of work. Additionally, be sure to talk about any problems you ran into along the way and how you overcame them, record any skills that you used or learned in order to finish the project, and put a summary of your work in an accessible place to show it off. Speaking of…
💼 Developing your Own Portfolio
Developing your own portfolio is critical for all of this to work. It’s great to do things that expand your knowledge and skills in STEM, but if you don’t communicate them effectively, it won’t matter.
A unique opportunity to potentially combine most of the points on this list is:
To use some of the coding knowledge gained in AP Computer Science, to code your own website from scratch and host it on GitHub Pages,
That hosts an article about a FIRST robot subsystem that you ended up designing, building, and testing.
On your website, you could also link to your LinkedIn account that shows your resume and allows you to connect with those that you meet at STEM events.
Whether you host a resume/portfolio on LinkedIn, or you develop your own website, having a place that you can link future employers to that shows off your expertise and passion is critical.
👥 Networking
Networking with others is like building up a source of potential energy.
“Cold-emailing” your resume and CV to a job requisition on a careers webpage of a large company is only going to get you so far. The phrase, “It’s all about who you know” is 100% true and you should position yourself to connect with as many relevant people as possible.
What is also important is to surround yourself with people that are better than you. What does this mean? Take a distance runner or endurance athlete for example. If a runner is running with a group of runners that are just a little better-more endurance, a little faster, etc.-then they will eventually condition themselves to have the same endurance as the better runners. This is similar to networking. If you aspire to be a scientist or engineer, interact with those that are active in the field and learn as much as you can from them.
You never know what opportunities might come up and when.
There are many places to connect with like-minded individuals that share an interest in science, technology, engineering, or math, even online. As a space nerd, I am a part of the Everyday Astronaut’s community. There I participate in discussions related to all of the current space happenings, connect with fellow scientists and engineers in the field, and also connect with students that are interested in going into the aerospace field.
Summary
There are a bunch of different ways to shift your pursuit of a career in STEM into high gear and the ones listed above are fairly all-encompassing. A combination of taking the right classes, being a part of the right clubs, and surrounding yourself with the right people, all while developing your own resume and portfolio are the best ways to position yourself for success.
Are you beginning to start this journey? Are you a parent of a student that might have questions? Or are you someone who might have already graduated from high school and needs to know how to make a change? If so, feel free to drop me a line at hi@natecordova.com and connect with me on socials.
