YZ: Where did you grow up? Where did you go to college?

 

Ms. S: I grew up in Idaho. Very beautiful. Very rural. We have the largest snow road wilderness access in the lower forty-eight states. It’s also really well known for potatoes. They did a good job of marketing them so Idaho potatoes are the gold standard. Where I grew up we got two weeks off from school for potato harvest because the farmers needed more labor help. 

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Three generations ago my family moved here so I grew up where my great-great-great- grandfather initially homesteaded. It was fun for me to grow up there but also very fun to finally leave. One of those places.

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I went for my undergrad to the University of Idaho. It was an interesting choice. I mainly went there for scholarships and in-state tuition, but it ended up being a really good decision for me. I studied science, and the school offered more hands-on opportunities for me. I then got my masters degree in New Jersey.

 

YZ: Do you have any hobbies? 

 

Ms. S: I’m definitely all about the outdoor rec, which is what I spend most of my time doing. I dabble in music a little bit. I grew up playing the violin, and I feel like you really have to be good at violin in order to take it to the next level, and I was never really that good. However, I started learning the mandolin, which is like a violin but you strum it. A very interesting hobby besides outdoor rec.

 

YZ: Have you always had a love for STEAM? Or is it something you discovered while in college?

 

Ms. S:

It is definitely something I grew to love. All the way through high school, I was more of a Humanities kid. My favorite classes were English and History, and I was interested in becoming a doctor. So, I had a really hard time deciding on a major in college, until I found out I had to take a lot of science-related classes for pre-med. It was kind of like an arranged marriage, and it ended up working really well.

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I really love STEAM now, but there was a steep learning curve, since I hadn't really studied it or known it until I got to college. It also made me realize you can learn anything, even if you don’t have a natural aptitude for it, if you’re interested in it and work hard for it. 

 

YZ: What compelled you to become a teacher? What would you say to be your dream job?

 

Ms. S: I didn’t mean to teach as a career. After getting my undergraduate degree, I was ready to apply to medical school, but I wanted to do something kind of service-oriented first. So, I applied to the Teach For America program, taught high school biology in Newark, New Jersey, and then fell in love with education in general. Not necessarily teaching in general, but also teacher training which led to my dream job: traveling around the world to do teacher training projects. One project led me to sub-Saharan Africa, which was super interesting. After that I thought about maybe leaving education, but I was introduced to Avenues and this program sounded so fascinating and cool that I said I was going to go for it. I would say I’m doing my dream job.

 

YZ: What is something no Avenues student knows about you?

 

Ms. S: Right after I graduated from college, I worked in a neuroscience lab for a year. I got to present my poster of my research at a neuroscience conference, and I was flying out of this tiny airport in northern Idaho. When I walked into the airport at six o’clock in morning, there was music equipment everywhere and I looked over in the terminal and the band The Roots were there. They’re Jimmy Fallon's band on The Tonight Show, and this was before that, when they were touring college campuses. So, it’s just The Roots and me in the airport and I walked through security holding my poster and Questlove asked me, “Hey, what you got there?” I told him, “Oh, it’s a poster for a neuroscience conference,” and then the manager comes up to me and asks if I want to practice the presentation on them and I said, “Sure.” So, I unrolled my poster and presented it to them, and they were such a wonderfully attentive audience. They even asked me questions and applauded at the end of my three-minute talk. It was really quite the experience. 

 

YZ: What is a piece of advice you would give to kids, especially to girls, pursuing STEAM?

 

Ms. S: I would say that it’s okay to try STEAM and fail. Just use the failure feedback to improve and do things differently. STEAM’s  subjects take a lot of persistence; things don’t always come easily at first, but you’ll find that if you pursue something you love you can do it. Also, I would recommend for anybody to find a career that sounds interesting and work backwards from college until high school. Find what you have to study in college and what courses can help you prepare for that and really have a plan for it. 

 

YZ: How are you approaching the coronavirus? Would you recommend social distancing?

 

Ms. S: Yes. I definitely think that practicing social distancing is essential, especially until we have more testing. It seems like from other countries who have had early run-ins with the virus that social distancing works, testing works, and then contact tracing works. So, until we have the ability to test way more people who might be sick and then trace who they’ve interacted with, I feel we have to keep up social distancing. 

 

YZ: What do you think is the scariest thing we face as society today?

 

Ms. S: I think the scariest thing for me right now is the wide spreading of misinformation. That leads to poor judgment and bad decision-making. I feel like we’ve had so many different changes as a society with globalization that our social responsibility hasn’t really caught up. 

 

YZ: Do you think our country's education system is best suited to prepare our students for the world?

 

Ms. S: I definitely think we’re doing some things right, but there are a lot of things that aren’t working. That’s really because the world has changed so radically and education has to adapt to the new normal. We need to teach students how to find the right information, apply it to situations, and prepare for the workforce of tomorrow. We can’t really predict what that workforce will look like. The education focus really has to shift to critical thinking, innovation, and collaboration as more of the centerpiece, as opposed to getting answers right on a test.