Our First Ever Presentation!

On February 23rd, we gave our first ever STEM presentation virtually to a group of middle schoolers at the East Orange STEM Academy High School in East Orange, NJ! Much to the students’ surprise, we were the Academy’s final guest speakers to celebrate Black History Month. To our surprise, some of the students already knew us from Tiktok!

We spoke to the group of students about the interesting careers that fall into STEM and different types of programs they could join while in middle school to gain interest in the sciences. We also provided them with a year by year high school roadmap to follow if they were thinking about pursuing STEM at the college level, highlighting key classes to take and activities to participate in.

Being our first presentation, we were really nervous as to how the school would respond to us. From the faculty, we were worried about how receptive they would be to two college students speaking to their school. From the students, keeping them engaged in such an educational presentation was our largest challenge.

However, once we began speaking, we had the full attention of everyone in attendance. Every couple of minutes we would improvise a quick anecdote or pun to keep the students enthused. Near the end of the presentation, we had a Q and A session where the students could ask us anything they wanted. We received more questions than we could answer in the time. Overall, it was a really fun first experience speaking to students (especially from our home state) and we look forward to speaking to the high schoolers soon!