There’s a new initiative in Hartford aimed at exposing area teenagers to careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The Connecticut Science Center is launching a program intended to get students engaged in these STEM fields.
Jonathan Morgan, 18, is an ambassador of the STEM Career Connections program that’s made up of students aged 15 to 18.
The ambassadors will get the opportunity to create STEM projects that’ll be presented to Connecticut Science Center patrons. Morgan said he’d like to inspire younger students in particular to jump headfirst into STEM.
“STEM is a pretty hard field especially when it’s something that’s complicated like space or anything like the medical field, so the earlier you just get into it, you can just get your feet in the water and you experience it, it’s going to be easier later on instead of trying to figure out something like when you get to college when it’s going to be harder,” Morgan said.
Matt Fleury, the president and CEO of the Connecticut Science Center, said the program is about exposing students to STEM at a younger age.
“The research that we have seen that is most compelling about this suggests that if you can capture a child’s imagination by the age of 13 around a topic such as science and technology, they can be two times or more more likely to be in an endeavor that’s related to science, technology, engineering, and math when they’re in college and leaving college into a career,” Fleury said.
Fleury believes the program will help the state find some new talent at a time when there’s a large need for skilled workers.
This story is part of American Graduate: Getting to Work, a public media initiative made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
