Session K04: The Pipeline for Physics Careers: Recruiting and Developing Precollege Students in the Era of COVID and Afterward

Live

The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous disruption of hands-on outreach activities intended to introduce students to careers in physics and related fields. The CENTAUR Nuclear Medicine and Science Summer Camp for middle and high school students held at Florida State University's Panama City (FSU-PC) Campus in the summers of 2018 and 2019 was forced online by the pandemic for the summer of 2020. For the summer 2020 camp, Denise Newsome and Paige Johnston, two teachers from the Deane Bozeman School (a public K-12 school in the rural Panhandle north of Panama City) collaborated with a professor from the FSU Physics Department (PC) to preserve many of the hands-on elements from the 2018 and 2019 face-to-face camps. With the support of CENTAUR, the FSU Physics Department and the FSU-PC staff, the online camp not only preserved many hands-on elements but also included innovations that will improve future face-to-face camps and provide the option of offering online camps to students in the Panhandle who are located too far from Panama City to commute to the face-to-face camps. Dr. Cottle will be joined by, Denise Newsome and Paige Johnston, high school educators for the Bay District Schools.   

Live

Diversity in STEM fields in National Laboratories, Academia and Industry is highly impacted by societal stereotypes and bias. Empowering Under Represented Minorities (URM) and women to consider a future in STEM fields is critical in order to increase the diversity in workforce pipelines. Strategies need to be targeted to the specific needs of the communities to bring those that need that support the most. I will share the process followed to develop the Summer Physics Camp for Young Women in Northern New Mexico which in 2021 will deliver its 5$^{\mathrm{th}}$ edition. This 2 week long program aims at empowering and increasing the STEM future aspirations of high school young women in Northern New Mexico through a variety of experiences which include: exposure to empowering female and male role models in STEM through a variety of hands on experiments, demonstrations and tours as well as exposure to local college opportunities, resources and information on National Laboratory Internships. The camp also teaches students the basics of successful job/internship CV writing and interviewing. This event also aims at impacting local public schools by partnering with educators who also get to participate providing a unique opportunity to personally engage with vibrant local STEM professionals in a very broad range of fields and activities that they can then bring to their classroom. The camp was converted to a virtual setting in 2020 due to COVID and with challenges we also realized new opportunities. At this time the 2021 Camp is being planned in a virtual setting open to the possibility for in person.   

Live

A number of organizations are struggling to adapt to the new landscape of public engagement in the COVID era. Most notably, science centers, such as museums and planetariums, have seen attendance numbers plummet, which raises grave concerns for the survivability of these important institutions. At the University of Colorado, we have met this challenge through collaboration between CU's Fiske Planetarium and the JILA NSF Physics Frontier Center's \textit{Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Community} (PISEC) program. PISEC focuses strongly on community partnerships, making it an excellent way to connect Fiske and other CU science centers to the local community without requiring in-person facilitation. I will discuss PISEC, the collaborative model created in partnership with Fiske, and preliminary research on the impacts of this new model.