Webinar Transcript: Building STEM Major Pathways

Anthony Su: Hey everyone. Good morning. Thanks for joining us today. Glad that you can make it.

We'll be chatting more about majors today. Last webinar, earlier this week, we did a talk about summer programs: what you should be thinking about? We systematically went through the different options. We'll be going through that with majors through – that similar process of going through the different options: what students are looking at, and best practices, or what students should be looking at doing and achieving, and programs – things like that.

Katie and Danya are here to join us. Katie, do you mind introducing yourself? And then Dayna?

Katie Young: Sure. Good morning everybody. Welcome to a Saturday morning webinar. My name is Katie Young. I'm the associate consulting director here at ILUMIN Education. I went to USC for my undergrad, where I studied English, and recently I got my master's degree in counseling from San Jose State. I've been with ILUMIN for about three years now, but I've been doing college consulting work since 2012.

Dayna Meyer: Hi everyone. My name is Dayna, and I'm a consultant here at ILUMIN. Most recently I graduated from USC with my PhD in education. I'm specifically looking at higher education, and everything in between – campus climate to admissions. And happy to be here. Thanks for joining us this morning. I hope we see some familiar names, since we can't see your faces!

And yeah, we'll get right into the STEM pathways. Thanks for coming.

Anthony Su: Perfect. And again, there’s a Q&A chat box. You can put your comments and your thoughts as we go through this process there. We'll try to take some time to address it in the end. Last webinar we went over a little bit, but I will try to make time for that this time!

So, definitely, let's just get started, and introduce STEM. Let's really try to concretely explain: what does STEM really mean in regards to majors? Is there a category, or a set of categories that we're looking at? Dayna, do you mind tackling that first?

Dayna Meyer: Yeah, for sure, Anthony. That's great – to set the foundation. So if you don't know what STEM stands for, it’s this popular acronym. So it stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. Not to be confused with even a newer pathway called STEAM – that's attaching arts to it – in the education community. STEM is really focused on the sciences, engineering, and math.

And to give you a little bit of an insight into different majors for science, you have biology, chemistry, physics, environmental science, neuroscience – things like that. Majors like that for technology: CS – computer science – is the big one that a lot of people are wanting to major in these days. It’s becoming really impacted and very popular. Less popular is AI – artificial intelligence. Machine learning. And then that goes into engineering of all types: civil engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical. One of my students I'll talk about later is interested in biomedical. So there are so many different subsections of engineering. In math: applied math, data science, stats – things of that nature. You actually don't see as many impacted math majors, and we can get into that a little bit later too.

And then sometimes you can add on art, which is, like I told you, STEAM – an emphasis that is becoming a little more popular – with graphic design, UI, UX, and design. I actually worked with college students looking to get into graduate school, and I see a lot of interest in the UI/UX fields for masters these days. So i'm thinking it's gonna transition into being a more popular undergrad major as well. And then you have engineering design and architecture.

So that's just to give you a holistic view of what STEM is, and some of the more popular majors associated with it.

Anthony Su: So STEM is really just a huge collective of different majors and avenues for students to consider. It’s not necessarily going to be one path, or the same path for each student.

Oh, I do want to make sure – please, if you're a student or a parent, feel free to put your major in the chat, or what you're thinking about majoring in. I wanted to do a poll, but I also wanted to make sure that you guys had the ability to let us know your thoughts so far, instead of putting you into a category for a poll. So feel free to put that in the chat. This way Katie, Dayna, and I can get a rough idea of what students are thinking about. We'll also try to address, specifically, those – if we have a lot of physics majors or something like that.

Right, and definitely, the next thought is, “Is this STEM necessarily more competitive or more popular in comparison to other majors that the colleges offer?”

Katie Young: Yeah. I mean, the short answer is yes. Especially from what we've seen this year – which, by the way, stay tuned for a May webinar where we're going to talk about admissions results from this year. But STEM majors are incredibly popular. Every college is working to beef up their STEM program and attract STEM students, because that's where the money is.

So you'll see: STEM programs are the flagship programs at most universities. When there are research advancements, or when there's success – stories like in the tech bubble, in the engineering field: the vaccine, for example. All of that brings a lot of attention to the university where that discovery was made or where that student attended. And that's really where all the innovation is coming through, especially through the media and to us.

When we hear about X entrepreneur, we hear that X entrepreneur went to Y college. Then Y college sounds really good, because if they went there and succeeded, I can do that too! So it's kind of a marketing thing. It's also an investment, in terms of: if we put a bunch of money into our biotech program, then we can get investors to come in as well and give us money. Basically, it's a money game. Colleges are businesses. Never forget that.

Bay Area students are particularly inclined to head into the STEM direction. I think you know – for pretty obvious reasons. For those of you who are not in the Bay Area, sorry. ILUMIN is based in the Bay Area, so we talk about Bay Area students a lot.

So in Silicon Valley culture, a lot of our students’ parents are in the tech field, or came to the U.S. to be part of the tech field. It's just been something that's part of their lives and part of their lifestyle, part of all their conversations, and what all their peers’ parents do.

And then there's a high value placed on going into this field. There are very lucrative employment opportunities. And I'll just share my screen quickly, just to give you an example of that. Sorry, let me pick this up. This is Payscale – highest paying jobs with only a bachelor's degree. I hope everyone can see that. And as I scroll down. I think you'll notice a trend. Engineering, computer science, accounting, material science, pharmacy, aeronautics… It just goes on and on, right? I am top 20 and I still haven't seen anything that's not relevant to STEM. Political economy – but still economics, right? That's still a STEM field, in a way.

So I think when parents start to think about their students’ futures, and when students start to think about their futures, they see that these jobs are the jobs that are going to get them the house, the car, the money, and the prestige. All that kind of stuff. And even if they're not interested in math or science, they'll push themselves this way. So, yes, STEM majors are more popular.

Anthony Su: Again, it’s a little bit of Bay Area culture, but also understanding that there are lucrative careers that come out of these fields. A lot of different considerations. But, at the same time, there are a lot of different STEM fields to consider for students thinking about this. So there's typically an option that we can help students find.

But, again, thinking through the majors and the colleges, and researching, trying to figure out: “What's a good fit for me?” How would you recommend students go through that, and figure out which specific major and which specific program they want?

Katie Young: Yeah, so there are a lot of options out there. I guess I would encourage students, first of all, to think beyond the common subjects that you'll see at school. There's only a set number of courses that are offered to you in a high school environment. And those get more and more specific and niche and refined as you move up through the levels of education. So don't stop at “biology.” Explore all the different places you can go with biology!

Excuse me, we just saw, on Payscale, “petroleum engineering.” I don't hear kids walking around talking about how cool petroleum engineering is! So I think it's worth it to invest some time in understanding: “What doesn't everybody already know about?” And, “How can I take advantage of that pathway?”

You can look at different ranking lists. There are a lot of them out there. I can pop some names in the chat, but Niche, U.S. News, College Factual. Payscale is actually pretty helpful – it'll help you identify not only majors but also careers and colleges that are the most high-earning, or will give you the biggest return on investment.

You can consider combined programs. There are actually some pretty interesting ones. Again. I'll go ahead and share my screen for this. I mentioned this at another webinar – so sorry if you're hearing this again! But Northeastern University has a lot of different interesting combined major programs where they put together fields that you might not generally expect to go together, and give the students a really specific direction for their career and their future. So if you're looking for something unique, maybe a little more suited to your varied interests – maybe you're a journalist and a computer scientist – these are some programs that you can look into. And it's not just Northeastern. It's a lot of different schools.

So how do you know a program is good? Rankings and lists. How do you know where it's going to take you? Something like Payscale, where you can look at the higher paying careers and majors. How do you know which colleges are the right fit for you? Here's a website called College Scorecard. It's a government website – actually run by the government. You can see which majors are the most popular at a given college from this website. So if you scroll down to “Fields of Study,” you can see the largest majors at Purdue are mechanical engineering, business administration, and computer science, while the majors at Amherst College – which is a smaller liberal arts college – are mathematics, economics, English, and psychology. So you can get a sense of why students are going there; what's drawing them in. And also you know what the opportunities are, and how well-known the program is, based on its size.

I'll put some of those links in the chat. Sorry, I know that that might have gone a little quickly for everyone. But when you're thinking about what you want to study, I don't want you to only think about the titles of the majors and the programs and the money and all that stuff. I want you to think about the contribution that you want to make in this field.

Generally what we'll see when we have students come in who say they want to study computer science and engineering is they're just very straightforward. Like, “I'm good at math; it's practical.” End of sentence. They don't really have an ultimate goal. They can't really picture themselves. When I say, “Where do you picture yourself when you're at your job in the future? Are you sitting in a cubicle? Are you working in a warehouse? Are you wearing goggles and looking at a lab coat?” They don't know. They can't see it.

If you have more of a goal – like a cause that you want to fight for, or a problem that you want to solve – and you want to do that using a STEM tool, that will help you to center more on exactly what you want to study, and also express better to colleges why you want to study that thing. It helps them see the through line for you. Here's who you are now, here's what you care about, and here's how you're going to maximize our resources to get there.

So there are a lot of ways to think about what major to choose, what college to choose, and which programs are good. I think the very last thing I would say is if you're already a senior right now and you're building your college list – looking beyond the numbers, again, and the odds of getting in – look into the department website for the major that you're investigating, and check out what they're researching. You can check out each faculty member within, let's say, the chemical engineering department, and see what their research focuses are, and which laboratories they have in the department. That'll give you an idea of, again, how do your goals or ideas line up with what that college is doing?

A ranking has a lot to do with the money that is invested, the alumni reviews, other colleges’ reviews of colleges. It’s kind of convoluted. So you need to double-check, regardless of the ranking, whether that school is a good fit for you and for what you want to do.

Anthony Su: Of course, being careful of the rankings. But I think these are a couple alternatives to consider when looking at these. I think you're saying, like with College Scorecard, seeing how many people graduate with that degree, and if it's a popular degree on campus, might also indicate whether or not they have more or fewer resources compared to other schools or other majors within the school, and things like that, right? As well as looking at these different pathways towards the major: whether it is three plus two, or the different options with interdisciplinary, or that you're required to do a couple co-ops as a graduation requirement. These are different ways to get – for example, with co-ops – actual work experience in the field that you're interested in. So to think beyond just that ranking system. Perfect.

Let's talk a little bit about the academic focus of high school students: what courses they should be taking. And then we'll be talking a little bit more on the specifics of each major. We have some slides to go through. But, Dayna, do you want to introduce, like, how should they tackle this course selection process? Things like that?

Dayna Meyer: Definitely. And just to tack on to what Katie was saying: when you go and look at those departments – the schools and then the departments – and what kind of research is being done, it's really good to demonstrate interest. If you haven't heard of the concept of demonstrating interest to private schools, it’s signing up for their newsletter, virtual college tours, webinars with the department that you're interested in, in addition to just the institution. More broadly, it's really good for creating a paper trail of you showing interest in the university – way before you're going into admissions. That can be a really important factor when they're deciding on whether to admit you or not. So just adding that in the mix. I’m telling a lot of my students about that right now.

So, yeah, in terms of focusing: what should you focus on to do different kinds of STEM majors in school, and how do you maximize different opportunities that you have, if you're trying to go into a certain pathway? I'll just take it through a few different areas, and give you some examples.

Academically, if you're looking to go into a math pathway, it’s really important to complete an AP calc course. At the least, AP Calc AB – but we really suggest for our students to do AP Calc BC. Because it's more challenging, it shows that you're more serious about the subject matter. But, again, weigh the pros and cons. If you struggled in pre-calc honors, or something like that, GPA matters too. Then perhaps do AP Calc AB! But if you're just trying to do AP calc AB because it's an easy A, challenge yourself to go that much further, and do AP Calc BC.

Work with a tutor. Whatever you need to do. It looks better on your transcript. If you're going into anything with math or applied math – anything with STEM, really – it looks really good. And AP Calc AB is becoming the bare minimum for what looks like you're challenging yourself, unfortunately. I didn't take AP Calc in high school, so the bar is set higher nowadays for you younger people! Just a good suggestion there.

In terms of science, having at least four years of AP or honors or anything like that. Having AP science courses for the entire duration of high school is important. For physics and engineering, it’s really important. And for computer science – or just any kind of engineering pathway. As you heard, there are numerous pathways for engineering.

AP bio and AP chem for anything in like a pre-med path. That's super important. And then if you're going into any kind of computer/computer science direction, AP comp sci is just something that should be on your transcript. Don't worry – I'll get into alternatives, if it's not offered at your school. We realize that not everything is offered at every school!

Some electives that might be good for you, that we have our students take, are like engineering design, digital electronics, interactive media, arts, and even like medical assisting and nursing. Assisting is really good, especially if you're going to the pre-med path and you're wondering, “How can I get more of an opportunity to be doing some of the work, besides just junior volunteering at a hospital or in a senior care home?”

So doing classes like that. Sports therapy. Cyber security. Things like that. Anything that goes towards the direction of the major you're looking to apply into – it's good to take electives like that, if your school offers them. And then, for art, you have AP 2D and 3D art, and then there are various electives in design, depending on the school.

But, like I said, if your school doesn't offer that, community colleges are really good supplemental avenues for taking courses. I was just helping a student sign up yesterday for summer classes. The schedule of classes for summer should be coming out – either this past week, or coming up. So take a look. Go to your local community college, type in, “schedule of classes” – that's what it's called – so you can get to see all the courses offered at one time. And then sign up for those, because they're free for high school students, so you might as well! Just use that as a really good opportunity. Make sure you do well in the class, though. You don't want to go to community college and get a B or C. It's a good GPA booster – and you get more course selections, if your school's not offering some of these things. So it’s pretty cool.

There are some computer programming courses online, like Java and Python. Especially if you're going into a CS direction, having multiple programming languages on your résumé is really helpful. I have all my students do that too. There are different certificate programs.

If you haven't heard of Coursera – especially if you're in eighth grade and going into the summer before high school – my students who are that young love to do Coursera classes. But even if you're older, just to get some kind of knowledge of different areas that you haven't explored yet like AI or UX design, Coursera is great. They're free MOOC classes with huge amounts of enrollees, so they can have like 30,000 students in one class. But it's free, and it'll just supplement the knowledge base for you. You can also get a certificate from there, which is pretty cool.

There are some online high schools that you can also take courses from. But science classes are a bit hard to find there, so you might need to supplement by being creative and looking into psychology or econ. Sometimes they have some computer science courses.

Those are different avenues for getting access to the knowledge that you need if this is the pathway you want to go to apply for for colleges. So if there are any questions around that, we can get into that a little bit later, too.

Anthony Su: Yeah, we'll go through it in a little bit. I do see some questions about business, or specific courses for specific majors. But understanding that bare minimum for math – it’s AP calc AB. BC is better, if you can get up there. With things like computer science, of course AP computer science makes sense. Bio and chem for pre-med. Things like that. And we'll go through the nuances of, like, “Do you take physics for pre-med?” and different things like that in a bit.

Let's kind of pivot over to the slides, and we'll try to systematically go through each of the majors. So, hopefully, everyone will get a rough idea of what we're thinking through.

First, let's see. Katie, are you gonna share your screen?

Katie Young: Yep!

So we talked just now – just a quick recap – we talked just now about how to determine a major in college that's a good fit, and how to kind of shape your academic pathway around STEM.

At this point we're gonna talk a little bit more about the activities portion – kind of the résumé-building portion – of building your STEM pathway. We can circle back at the end and answer specific questions about classes for certain majors. Generally our answers are going to be, “It depends,” but we'll do our best!

Life Science/Pre-Medical

So I'll go ahead and get started with the first slide, which is for life science or pre-medical. When we say “life science,” we mean related to the body or to medicine, for the most part. We have a separate slide that focuses on environmental and earth sciences.

So at your school, some things to look out for or get involved in are pre-medical or biology-focused clubs. Just like a special interest club that your school has available. This is for high school, by the way. Maybe like a mental health or psychology or even neuroscience-related club. I know my student at Monta Vista is involved in a neuroscience club. My student at Leigh High School is starting a mental health mentorship club. There are lots of opportunities to not just explore your interests but even share it with other people at your school!

Mental health, health, wellness – all of that kind of goes together when you're thinking about a career in healthcare. Because, if you want to care for people's health, you need to care about people. So showing some experiences where you're contributing is helpful.

Some competitions that are relevant, that students interested in life science or pre-med might want to look into: USABO – that's the USA Biology Olympiad – or Science Olympiad. These are long-term programs. The students compete as part of a team, and they attend various competitions throughout the year. One of my students is going to the state-level competition in a couple of weeks. But she's been studying since August, so it's a big commitment. You have to study a lot to do well on these tests. But scoring well on these tests can get you state-level awards or national-level awards, which is huge for colleges. They also force you to invest a lot of time into learning science – which you need to be sure that you like science if you're going in a pre-med direction because, my goodness, there's lots of years of school ahead of you!

On your own, you can work on science fair projects. You can write your own research papers and submit them to competitions. You can start a blog or a podcast. I've had this happen with a student before – he started a bioethics blog. You can look into some online courses, like Dayna mentioned – on Coursera. Actually my student just finished a biotechnology/bioinformatics course on Coursera. There's lots of interesting stuff there.

There is obviously hospital volunteering, which we kind of glossed over earlier – which has obviously been really difficult for the past year, but I'm sure we'll get back into full swing sooner than we think. Helping students with special needs. Mental health – mental wellness is important. And assisting the elderly. That doesn't mean you only sit there and keep them company. You could try engaging with them, or creating programming for them. I did have a student create like a health course for seniors to take at their senior center. It was a really cool project.

And then, for summer, capstone-wise we recommend a research or a project based program. So like UC Santa Cruz SIP, or BostonU RISE – these are some big name research programs. You could also shadow some doctors or some professionals in your area.

But right now, for those of you who were here on Wednesday for our last-minute summer plans presentation, there are still a few programs that are open: ASDRP, Stanford EXPLORE, UCSD Academic Connections, Rosetta Biomedical Workshops. Some of these are more lecture-format, academic-format, or workshop-format, and then ASDRP is actually a research program.

All summer programs are going to be online this year – sorry. And no, there's not one program that's better than others. It's about how well it fits into your profile and your goals, and what you get out of it. 

Physical Science/Environmental Science

Dayna Meyer: Yeah, and Ii'll take it for our next slide: physical science and environmental science. Let's look into physical science/environmental science. If you're interested, try doing things like physics club, astronomy club, chem club, or environmental club. These are all good. There are also some good volunteering projects on – if you've never heard of it – it's called Zooniverse. I'll type it in a second. But it has really good short-term volunteering project-based things, in all disciplines. There's a lot of life science and physical science stuff that you can do for volunteering, if you're just looking for some hours and some interesting topics.

In terms of competitions, we have Physics Bowl, the Science Olympiad, which does take a lot of time. Same with Chemistry Olympiad. You have to study a lot and have a lot of knowledge in order to do well at those competitions.

And then things that you can do on your own, which are equally great: science fair, research papers, and online courses. It really helps to start a research paper and then get involved with something – like ASDRP, or some other avenue where you're doing directed research with the mentor, because you can potentially expand on what you've been doing on your own. These are really good options.

In terms of community service: environmental stewardship, wildlife rehab, and museum volunteering. And like there are all different kinds. Physical science and environmental science cover a breadth of different areas – so if you have a particular interest… I have one student who's interested in veterinary sciences, so wildlife rehab or anything with animals. And I know that in Cornell Pre-college Courses, this summer, they have large animal versus smaller animal types of courses. There's really a bunch of different subjects you could look at – so remember that it's not just what we're saying here, okay?

Then, in terms of some summer options that would be good for you, as with the research and project-based papers, academic programs and volunteering, it's pretty standard stuff across different majors you're doing. It's just what that looks like for you will be tailored depending on your particular interests.

Some things that are still open are UCSD Academic Connections and UCLA Summer Institutes. They have really fun ones this year; I love it! I was just able to suggest it to a student yesterday – so they really are open still. So sign up! And, oh, here it is: Zooniverse. 

And then Cornell Summer College. Like I was saying, they still have ones that are open – especially because summer program decisions are coming out, so some students are having to make a decision whether to attend this program or that program. So there are still going to be spaces in different areas. Lots of good options still. So you're not late to the game!

Katie Young: Yeah, and just real quick on that UCLA note: there's like an international development summer institute that actually veers into an environmental science and climate change sustainability program. So, again, ways to combine and overlap different interests, or to combine your interests with an existing and ongoing social problem that you want to solve. Or, in this case, existential problem!

Math (Accounting, Finance, Applied Math)

The next category we're gonna go into is math. We're grouping a lot of things under “math,” including some business disciplines like accounting and finance. “Applied math” just means practical math, or using math in different subjects. Applied math is often associated with computer science. 

At school, we would recommend that there's always going to be a math club – because high school students are not as cool as you think! There's an econ club, and there’s always a stock market or an investors club, where they do fake stock market portfolios and see how they do, and compete against each other, which is really fun.

There are different kinds of competitions that your student can enter. The AMC is really the popular one – and doing well on those will get you into the AMIE. You can Google all these. Basically they're just really high-level math competitions. If students do well, colleges want to see. MIT and Caltech – I think even CMU – have spaces on their applications specifically for these scores. So if you're aiming really high, and you're aiming for STEM, these are definitely exams to invest your time in. They occur once per year – I believe in the spring. Start looking into how you can get involved for next year. And then Math Olympiad is similar to Science Olympiad. You have to study a bunch of topics and then take a test, and your score’s compared to other people’s.

On your own, there are lots of theory courses around math. There are lots of finance courses around math on Coursera and other MOOCs – platforms like that. You can build your own stock portfolio if you want to. I had a student whose parents gave her a thousand dollars and she just went for it. I don't have that kind of money, but if you happen to, and you want to really see how the investment sphere works, it's a cool opportunity to really understand the practical aspects – rather than watching “The Wolf of Wall Street”!

Community service-wise, I've had a lot of students who have found a way to coach middle school math clubs or math teams – especially teams that are preparing for Math Olympiad, or other math competitions. I've had students who tutor their peers in lower-level math classes at high school. They'll stay after school and they'll tutor. If they're in calculus, they'll tutor Algebra 1. So just finding ways to help other people engage with the thing that you're interested in. There are not a lot of other math-related things you can do!

In the summer there are lots of really cool advanced math programs. Ross is a really cool one. There's PROMYS at BostonU, and then HCUSiM, which is Hampshire College. I can put these in the chat.

Or interning with a professor. I have some students who just will cold call or contact professors and say, “Hey, I looked into your research and I'm really interested in it. I've learned this and this and I think I could contribute. Would you allow me in your lab?” And if you're 16 and over, and you're very lucky, you just might get such an opportunity

So for this summer, some things that are still open: SPARC @ UC Berkeley, which is a combination of philosophy, math, and a few other topics. That's a really unique program, somehow still open. And then Penn has Moneyball Academy. It’s also really interesting that Penn actually has a few things open still, and I think we'll mention those on other slides. But Moneyball is that movie with Brad Pitt – if you guys haven't seen it. It's this guy who figured out how to quantify the talents of baseball players and make trades or make decisions about the teams that way. So it's a sports business plus economics and mathematics program. It's really interesting.

Engineering/Architecture/Design

Dayna Meyer: In terms of engineering and architecture and design, I think one of the most popular extracurricular activities for any engineering-major pathway is robotics. You can even be into computer science and want to be on the robotics team, because there's a whole component for that!

There’s engineering club. There's an architecture and design club. I'm trying to have one of my students join the design club next year. I know that joining clubs has been a little bit different with the online learning platform, so if you fell off from doing clubs this year, don't worry. It was really different. Hopefully, if schools open up – which I'm thinking they will – do the club rush day. Go up to all those booths that you missed last year. Get involved. Try to get a leadership position over time. I've had a lot of students start a pre-med club, and be the founder and then the president or vice president or co-president – something like that. That's really helpful!

In terms of competitions, you have the FIRST robotics competition. Plus there are so many other ones too, depending on your school district and how involved the school is in the robotic scene. There are plenty of different ones. There's the Tech Challenge. There's the science and maker fair.

And then, on your own, you can build and make things, and do what we call “signature projects” – where you're taking the skills you have and doing something with those skills. It's nice to build something or create something, or do something in service for a community of people, and having that component to aid whatever you're doing in engineering – to have that service side of things. Learning CAD-type programs and different kinds of languages like. Especially if you're in robotics, learning CAD programs is really helpful. Computer programming, and all those different languages that we talked about earlier.

In terms of community service, there's LEGO robotics coaching. And then anything with a museum like the Tech or Exploratorium. Different kinds of volunteering that would allow you to get out and start applying those skills that you're learning in different forums.

And then, in terms of summer, there are different kinds of architecture and design programs – and also engineering programs – that are project based, hands-on, or just informational, depending on where you're at in the engineering interest journey. My students are just like, “I think I'm interested in engineering.” If you don't have a lot of knowledge of it – you’re just getting involved in understanding what engineering is – it can be helpful. And then the next step would be doing a project to see if you actually enjoy learning how to use your skills hands-on, and different things like that.

Then just different internships as well. It can be research-based – but, again, if that's not the direction you're going for beyond college. I had a student who was like, “I'm not interested in research, period.” I probably wouldn't want them to do a research-based program, right? They're more into the applied side of things. But I have a lot of students actually interested in research at the high school level, so then I say go for those kinds of research programs!

Things that are still open right now are Cal Poly EPIC, and Blue Stamp Engineering – which I have a student going to, and there's an interview with that, so prep for it! You have to do all the essays, and then they'll call you back and you can do an interview with them if they want to pursue you further. So prep for that, and have good Zoom etiquette. There’s USC Summer Sessions, and then there's something called Design the Future. So, yeah, there's still some stuff open for that as well.

Katie Young: Just a quick glimpse into Design the Future: I had a student go a couple years ago. It's a really cool, short-term program, and it's not too expensive. The students actually devise and design a tool that will help someone who has a disability. So they actually work in a group with a person who has a disability, and that person will give ideas of what they need, what they want, and what would help them. Then the group will design and engineer and manufacture a prototype of that product. So it's a really interesting way to apply it to solve a problem; it's always good!

And then USC Summer, I just want to mention, they have “exploring engineering” and “exploring architecture” – both intro-level programs. And USC has a great engineering school and a great architecture school! So I think that's a pretty solid opportunity, not too hard to get into.

Computer Science

Okay, for computer science… I think computer science is actually the most obvious and practical of these disciplines. It's pretty straightforward what computer science is!

At school, you should join your computer science or coding club. There are lots of clubs – like Girls Who Code, or hackathon club. Hackathons are these competitions where students will go for 24 hours straight and work as a group to design an app or a program. It’s pretty neat.

USACO is the USA Computing Olympiad – similar to USABO, similar to USAPhO! They're all the same kind of thing. Basically you study a lot of stuff and then you submit your score and see how well you do.

In FIRST Robotics you work as part of a team to build a robot that executes a certain task. And then for Technovation you build an app to solve some sort of problem. My student who's in Technovation now is working on an app that's supposed to help people with ADHD to better focus and stop using their phones. I'm not sure. She's not really able to describe it because she's not doing the coding part. So hopefully it's cool!

On your own, you can design an app or a website. Go for it – why not? You can get your own website going that showcases you as a person. You can get a website going for a community organization – which I'm going to mention in a second. One of my students this last year spent a ton of his free time contributing to open-source projects online. Different corporations will use these open-source tools online that programmers are crowdsourcing and working on together, and anyone can contribute. There are different tasks to work on, and as you contribute, somebody will review your work and give you feedback. So it's very professional.

Maker faire is a cool option to prepare and present a project that's related to computer science. And then, obviously, online coursework. It’s very easy to do computer science coursework online! Mentoring younger students is great. You can be the tech support kid at the library – there are lots of elderly people who don't really know how to get on “the Facebook” and they need help. So if you're the teen tech at the library, it's just a nice thing to do.

You can find a political candidate, you can find a club at your school, you can find a non-profit, or you can ask your school if they need an app designed or a website designed. Why not see if there's some way that you can contribute? I had a student do this for – I'm going to talk about it later in my case study, actually. I'll talk about a different one. I had a student who was on the baseball team and realized nobody was coming to the baseball games, so he created an app that was like his high school sports app, where it would tell everyone the time and location of the upcoming sporting events, so that more people would show up. It's very simple, but it's very cool!

Obviously a research- or project-based program would be great. A personal project is fine. If you just work on something on your own time that you're investing into, and you can show it to colleges, that's fantastic!

Some things that are still open are Inspirit AI – which will teach you some basic AI tools, and then have you choose a discipline to design a project around. I had a student do a biotech project. UCSB Summer Research Academy – pretty competitive, but it has a rolling deadline, so it's still open, technically. And then Pioneer is an online program that will pair you with a mentor, and you can design your own project that you want to work on and have some professional help.

Business

Dayna Meyer: Now we'll do business. I think, if I remember correctly, I think it was Ariana who asked a question, “What about business?” I think that was back when I was talking about the academic focus. So advanced math – completely. If you could do AP calc BC, for sure. That's really important, because, depending on which direction you go in business, math is going to help you. I also suggest, if you don't really know which direction you're going in, to do AP psych as well, because understanding the psychology of people is super important for business.

I just want to tackle that before getting into all the extracurricular elements of it. If you're going on a business pathway, there are two sides. I tell my students there's the econ/business side, and then there's more of the marketing/communications/advertising side of business. So there are different personalities for different kinds of directions.

In terms of clubs: business club or entrepreneurship club. Leadership is great: like ASB, and anything involved with that. Marketing positions, fundraising positions, treasury positions… Anything with that. Sometimes schools have a DECA club that's really business-oriented – if you have that on your school campus. Even Model United Nations club. Or organizing anything where you can be a leader. Organizing, facilitating, planning. Things like that will look really good for you!

There's FBLA and DECA. So check out your school. They should have it. It's in most schools that I've seen. I've never really seen a school that didn't have these clubs available – and if they don't, you can start it. That looks good for leadership too!

And then on your own, start a small business! I had a student – a lot of students – do little non-profit business startups during the pandemic, where they were taking either the totality of the funds that they fundraised, or a portion of it, and donating it to COVID relief. Things like that. There are lots of things you can do online with that.

You can start a stock portfolio: real or fake. UCLA Summer Institutes also has an investing option. So if you're interested in the investing and stock market side of things, go on that site; it's still open. I'm gonna have a student do one of those sessions this summer, so it'll be really great!

Then you can do online business coursework through Coursera. I'm also having that same student take a business or marketing community college course this summer so that she can continue on the exploration path with that.

In terms of community service, marketing for a nonprofit is great. For instance, yesterday I was looking at different humane society and animal shelter things that you could volunteer with, and they always have a marketing section. Of course, if you need animals adopted out, you're gonna have marketing volunteers. It would be perfect if you're interested in that, and then you love furry friends too. Go for it!

Then you could make business plans, like Katie said. She had a student who made a whole course plan for elderly people. That sounds amazing, like that's awesome and innovative! And then anything where you can get leadership experience looks really good: working with people, and things like that.

There are still some open programs right now. This Penn Sports Business program is open. I haven't had any students do that program, but I assume that it's going to teach you how to take data, do analytics, and things like that. And trends to look at, and how to interpret data. It’s really positive, and Penn's a good school anyway, so might as well get involved with that. There's the Georgetown Institutes, and then, again, the USC Summer Sessions. Really good opportunities still.

Kate Young: Yeah, and again, these programs are all going to be online. I'm going to really quickly – I know we're almost out of time, Anthony, and we're going to do case studies in just a second – but somebody asked me to go back to the computer science program real quick, so I'll do that while i'm talking.

Computer Science

What we've noticed with the summer programs is that they're not really discounting the tuition very much, or the cost of the program very much, even though it's taking place online. So the summer programs are going to feel really expensive, and like a really big investment. I just want to clarify that we are just suggesting these as options for your summer. There's no college that is expecting you to spend thousands of dollars on any kind of a summer activity.

Whenever possible, try to find a way to do a personal project or serve your community. I understand it's really hard for bio or chemistry majors to do a project on your own if you don't have lab equipment! But for computer science, there's a lot that you can do at home. For engineering, there's a lot that you can do with just a little bit of mentorship and some tools. Try to be innovative with the activities that you do – that will also make them original! You're not joining into somebody else's program or project; you're doing something that's totally you: that you came up with. So feel free to just ignore the idea of a summer program and just do your own thing! I've seen students be very successful without any kind of high-quality summer program on their résumé. And then I've had the opposite, which I'm about to show you in my case study. Bummer!

But, okay, for whoever wanted the computer science slide, I hope I left that up for long enough. But we will be posting these slides, right, Anthony? Or emailing these slides later?

Anthony Su: Yep! And we’ll go over two case studies now.

Katie Young: Okay. So I had a student – we’ll just call him “D”. He graduated. He was class of 2020, so he almost got through the pandemic!

He had a 3.9 unweighted GPA and a 36 ACT, so he was obviously a very stellar student when he came in. But when he came in as a current sophomore, he didn't have any computer science experience on his résumé. He just had an interest, and had done some just really basic programming activities online. And he didn't really know where to go.

So we applied to COSMOS. COSMOS is a UC-based program that is focused on science, tech, and engineering. The application’s closed, so don't worry about it for this year. But there are a lot of programs that sound really flashy, and there are some that sound really weird. He went for a weirder option, which was sound for virtual reality, and got a spot. And he actually really enjoyed it.

Sorry it says COSMOS is “not the most”... I was going to finish that sentence! Not the most popular program. But he really enjoyed that, and was able to bring some of those skills back to continue developing his computer science skills.

He decided to just contact some organizations that he was a part of, and see if he could help them. One of those was his high school, which said, “no.” And one of them was his Chinese school, which said, “yes”! So he actually created a program that would automatically grade the test that the students took at the Chinese school – which was obviously super helpful for them, and a super valuable experience for D!

Later that same year he joined Junior Achievement, which is an entrepreneurship program where students make their own small businesses or products and pitch them for competition. He was able to become the CEO of his JA company, and designed, printed, and marketed a product. I think that that also showed some leadership and initiative abilities.

The following summer, between junior and senior year, he was accepted to a research internship at UC Santa Cruz, as part of their Science Internship Program, at the Expressive Intelligence Studio. Again, he was able to really learn a lot from that, build on his virtual reality experience, and build on the programming languages that he learned on his own

Eventually he got accepted and waitlisted at some pretty stellar computer science programs. And, again, this is a student who didn't have anything going on as of the middle of sophomore year. So it is entirely possible to build up your résumé and have a lot of clout!

I think one thing that was key for D was having this unweighted GPA and this test score. If you can succeed this well academically, then everything else is a plus on your application. Versus if you're down here, and you're trying to add up the activities, it's going to take a lot longer. So get your academic ducks in a row before you pursue all of these outside opportunities!

Dayna Meyer: I like that: academic ducks in a row. That's really good. Yeah, GPA first. The the better your GPA is, the more competitive the schools are you are applying to. And then extracurriculars matter after that.

My student – we’ll call her A – she came to me senior year. So I helped her through this recent admissions process.

She had a 4.0 unweighted. No SAT or ACT to speak of. So there's hope if you haven't taken your SAT or ACT, and proof that it won't negatively impact you for admissions!

I just want to put that out there – since there's still fear from a lot of my students and families that if you don't submit test scores it will negatively impact you, even if it's “test-optional.” No. They cannot do that. It would be totally inequitable, and equity is a huge huge issue on college and university campuses right now. So they cannot hold that against you! I just want to preface that, because hopefully that takes some weight off – if your tests have been canceled, or if your scores aren't coming in as good as you want them to. It really is test-optional right now! Just want to say that.

So, yeah, she came to me with an interest in biomedical engineering – predominantly. Some schools she applied to as bioengineering, and some schools she applied to as mechanical, depending on the school. Because “biomedical” is not available at every school she was applying to. Just to keep that in mind.

She had a lot of different STEM activities. Not like ten of them, but a good handful where she was very invested, and part of the leadership team. She was the lead of mechanical for her robotics team. She was the vice president and co-founder of the pre-med club. Like I told you, if there's no pre-med club, and you're going in a pre-med direction, start that club. That looks great for leadership! She also designed and organized a COVID relief station, where she was both engineering and distributing face shields for people. And she was organizing people under her – so that was really helpful.

In addition to that, she was very passionate and involved in her school newspaper. She was the lead editor. That took up a lot of her time. She would write numerous articles. She was a really good writer – and I want to also preface that. As an engineering-intended major student, she could also articulate herself very well. So I think that that also helped in her college applications. There was no question why engineering and biomedical engineering was the direction for her. I think that it really helped her in the admissions process.

In addition to that, she was well-rounded. She was on the swim team. She was a pet sitter. She was a math tutor. Very involved with her German school. And played the accordion – which I've never had a student do! So she was very well-rounded, but also focused. And we’ve talked a lot about that. You can reference our past webinars, where we talk a lot about being well-rounded and focused.

And a couple of awards. She was a National Merit Scholar semi-finalist. She had some different German-language awards. She was an AP Scholar.

She was very involved with the activities she was in. So that really goes to show, if you invest time and energy into the activities you're doing, and you take on some leadership positions, it can really make a difference in your profile!

She got into every single one of the schools she applied to this year with her intended major, which is pretty amazing. I would say she was also really grounded when she was going through the application process. She wasn't like, “I want only all Ivies.” She was very realistic, and she looked at the programs and the faculty members. What Katie was saying: she looked at the research being done, and what faculty members there were. There were many factors into her building her college list.

So she got into the Purdue Honors College in biomedical engineering. Also the honors program at UT Austin. Virginia Tech, and Cal Poly. The UCs that she was interested in were Merced, Santa Barbara, and Davis. Then Santa Clara and the University of San Diego. Rice was her ultimate dream. She was deferred, but she wrote a letter and got accepted. I'm really proud of her. Actually she's looking at Purdue as being her first choice right now, because she got so much aid offered to her per year. So you never know what's going to happen!

Katie Young: Wow!

Dayna Meyer: Yeah, I know! I'm really proud of her. But I wanted to share this case, because you don't need ten extracurricular activities and a bunch of different things going on. You can invest your time wisely, develop those skills, and do it like that. So hopefully that's inspirational to you high school students out there.

Anthony Su: Yeah, definitely. I’m glad that we could go through both case studies.

We'll go through a few questions. I know we're a bit over time, but the other thing that I saw students were interested in was neuroscience and public health, and I realized we didn't have slides for that. So do you want to quickly talk about what that would look like?

Katie Young: Sure. For neuroscience, we're going to follow a combo biology and psychology path. Focusing on more of the mental health aspects of healthcare. Also research is great.

But I think what's cool about neuroscience is that it's kind of interdisciplinary. Neuroscience overlaps with artificial intelligence. It overlaps with linguistics. It overlaps with a lot of different sciences. So definitely prepare hard in the science disciplines and the math disciplines, and then look into what you can do around mental health and wellness and brain science.

There are not a lot of programs. Neuroscience is more niche, so you're not going to find a dozen summer programs around neuroscience. But where you can find one, they'll be really interesting! Stanford has one that I'll put in the chat in a second.

For public health: public health is one that I think often gets really overlooked. Technically it is a social science. Public health is going to combine some political aspects with some economic aspects, some historical aspects, and some racial and ethnicity aspects. And environmental.

There are lots of things that go into considering what aspects of our cities and environments affect our health. So it's actually a great choice for a pre-medical student to go into. It's going to be a little bit less competitive than bio or neuro, or a really hard science program. It's interdisciplinary. And it also shows us students are not only interested in being a doctor and making money, but making an impact – maybe going into law or politics around health. Lots of different directions you can go with public health.

Dayna Meyer: To jump onto that, I also dropped the USC summer program for high school students called “The Brain: Intro to Neuroscience.” I think that's a good opportunity if you're looking for something to supplement the one you're dropping, Katie.

And “interdisciplinary.” I think there was a question about that. So the way Katie's using it is that you're pulling in different disciplines from different places and they put it together. Some programs and some majors have an interdisciplinary program, where it's like taking classes in two different disciplines, and then making a major out of it. It's becoming more popular these days. So hopefully that clarifies one of those questions that I think I saw earlier in the chat.

Anthony Su: Yeah. The other question I was actually gonna ask was about the “interdisciplinary major,” or looking at these more niche programs, and things like that.

So do you want to just quickly reiterate and talk about this, because a lot of students right now might be thinking, “I don't even know between engineering or CS!” How would a student who's still trying to figure out what they want to study think about interdisciplinary majors?

Katie Young: It's just about thinking, “What am I interested in, and how can I combine those two things?” I was mentioning in one of the Q&A answers how you can combine environmental science and business. It doesn't seem like you can, but actually there's a huge industry right now for finding sustainable ways to run businesses, to run shipping, or to run product management!

One of my students this year, who – yay! – just got into Penn, was working on how to use computer programming in order to do redistricting for politics. I'm sure some of you have heard of gerrymandering – unfair lines drawn around districts. How can we use a computer to do that more fairly? So he's interested in politics. He's interested in computers. “How can I combine those things?” If I'm interested in history and I'm interested in neuroscience, how can I combine those things? So looking into your own ideas of how those things might overlap, and then also seeing if colleges offer some programs. You can always just double major, or major and minor in two different things.

But, yeah, being a unique applicant. You can do it in many different ways. You can do it with your résumé, or with your essays. You can also do it with the major that you choose, and your future plans and goals.

Anthony Su: Cool. Perfect! Hopefully we covered quite a bit of how to go through and isolate these different majors and things like that!

But definitely, of course, I appreciate everyone joining this morning. We're going to be taking breaks from webinars – I think we’ve got about two weeks until the next one. But let me share our webinar schedule, because we'll be updating it here. We'll also send out emails when there are going to be more things.

But we'll likely be joined in May. We have UCSB and Emory for sure, coming to do a webinar with us to talk about admissions and that next step. So parents, families, definitely be ready there. We'll do a similar kind of Q&A session with them. And then we'll also be able to answer your pressing questions as well. Test-optional, I'm sure, is going to be a hot topic there!

So okay, perfect. Appreciate it everyone. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Dayna.

Katie Young: Sorry for going overtime, guys! Have a good day.

Dayna Meyer: Bye!

Anthony Su: See you guys.

Katie Young: Bye.