Ana26 Pre-con Podcast: Building the Future of STEM with AEOP

In this episode, we welcome Donna Burnett, Executive Director of the K-12 University Center at RIT, to discuss the transformative work of the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP). Moving beyond simple skill-building, Donna highlights how AEOP fosters a national STEM workforce by focusing on the "human element" - helping students from elementary school to postdoctoral levels find their authentic career fit. We dive deep into STEM Foundations, an innovative initiative born out of the pandemic to support students through reflection, mentorship, and "failing forward." By helping youth build resilience maps and craft their own STEM stories, the program ensures they don't just enter these fields, but thrive in them. Whether you are a student, parent, or educator, tune in to learn how AEOP is bridging the gap between talent and long-term success. Visit AEOP at Ana26, Booth 551!

Transcript

Andrew 0:00

Trace, we have legitimately got a great show. Yeah, we do. I am very excited about our guest. Very passionate and energetic about what she is doing and the impact that she has already has had and is going to continue to have. Just the beginning. Yeah, just the beginning. But the thing that I thought of I'm not overselling it, is this reminded me of what would be a playbook for Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Are you familiar with that book? Yeah. So the idea is that there's no such thing as a self-made person. Instead, there's a whole network of individuals that help that individual get to where they are. And I see this as a immediate playbook that is being put into action by an organization to help students achieve what might take you a lifetime to build up that network to get to where you are. This is kind of a way for them to get put into a pipeline and advance them to be able to make decisions that might take a lot longer to make and they actually know who they are.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

And to learn how to be a reflective human at a young age, which is actually even more transformative than knowing the science.

Andrew 1:10

Agree. You have to know who you are to know where you're going. So without further ado, let us welcome Donna Burnett to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Thanks. I'm happy to be here. I am Donna Burnett. I am the executive director of the K-12 University Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, where we facilitate a portfolio of initiatives to serve our local, regional, and the national community. So I'm here to talk about my involvement with the Army Educational Outreach Program. I serve as the lead of the consortium that facilitates so many initiatives on behalf of Army STEM. Our goal is to create a strong national STEM workforce to benefit our nation.

Andrew 1:54

That's awesome. Yeah, you know, I've seen AEOP because we're education and we love our acronyms. I've seen AEOP in a lot of places, but I certainly know I recall at previous NSD conferences I've gone to, I've seen them there. They've had a strong presence. I know you were talking about STEM. Can you tell us a little bit more about what is the focus? How is it what is the Army's thought process and being part of this?

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Great question. I appreciate that. So, yes, AEOP is everywhere at so many conferences in the STEM STEM ecosystem. We are engaging with youth, we're engaging with teachers, we're engaging with families, we're engaging with students from elementary all the way up to postdoctoral scientists and engineers. And we're doing this on behalf of the Army because the Army wants to inspire, attract, support, provide enrichment to create our next generation STEM workforce. And we need to do this because we want to have strength and peace, we want to have strength and innovation, we want to have a strong economy, all of those great things that help us be strong and competitive as a nation. So the AEOP initiatives are not recruiting participants into the Army or Department of Defense. Instead, we're supporting STEM enrichment and advancement at all levels, the general career pathways. And then at the highest levels of our programs, we are familiarizing our participants with opportunities for them to work as civilians in the defense industrial base opportunities. So whether they're for government contractors, whether they're for Army laboratories throughout the nation, whether you're working at a university, we're showing those pathways and career opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

It's really cool you mentioned that because both of my uncles worked for they're retired now, but they both worked at the Pentagon as engineers, as civilians. And I don't think people realize how many civilian jobs there are in the military without being a part of it through family members or friends or any of that kind of stuff. So this is a really cool outreach program. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

In addition to that, not many people realize how many university labs are also supported by the Army and Department of War, Department of Defense.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:09

So it's it's really illuminating how many connections there are to these career pathways.

Andrew 4:16

And it sounds like an intentional investment into pathways, which there are many pathways into supporting this work. Now, I've heard a little bit about a STEMS Foundation class that you all offer. What can you tell us a little bit about that? What is what does that look like and what does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 4:34

Yeah. So STEM Foundations is actually something that I worked on, and it came out of COVID. So all of a sudden we had so many. Part of my job is to facilitate the internships and fellowships program. So this came out of our work with high school interns. So these are high school students, super talented, super motivated, high school students from throughout the nation and at our DOD schools who are interested in doing hands-on research under mentorship from Army scientists and engineers, either at the university or in the Army laboratories. So every year we get thousands of applications for about 300 to 500 positions. Oh, wow. So we have so many talented and motivated youth, and we're looking for opportunities to serve them. So during COVID, all of a sudden we had nothing for the students who were selected. So we were able to stand up like many other institutions were. What happens next? What evolves? Well, I was looking at the data that suggested that we actually have a problem with retention in STEM fields. So even if we're sparking interest, how are we retaining students in STEM? We were seeing people who were finishing their PhDs very successfully drop out and saying, I don't want to do this anymore. This is not the pathway for me. Really? So what do we do there? So I was doing some research, talking to folks, and really got to the point of thinking about belongingness and folks feeling like their fit was no longer in these fields. So how do we support our students such that they're thinking early on about their fit? They're thinking early on. I don't want to just become a doctor or an engineer because my parents told me that this would be a good job.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

I want to do this because it fits with a future I see for myself. And they themselves are becoming, right? So they themselves are figuring out who they are. So how do we prep them with the questions and the thought processes to be able to figure out, as they're figuring out who they are, is this a career pathway that fits with me, with my values, with my skills, with my wants for my life? So we developed STEM foundations using the platform we had tested during COVID to really address these very concepts. So we already know that you're incredibly talented and motivated to go into these fields. But how can we provide you with this opportunity for reflection, for connection, and for mentoring to set you up for long-term success?

SPEAKER_01 7:29

I love that because I started out as a forensics major. I thought I wanted to be a forensics major in college. I got all the science courses out of the way. And then I realized this is not the path for me. So I didn't waste a year, but I kind of did. So I love the idea of getting kids into spaces to be able to try something out to see if it's worth their time, effort, and energy because it is expensive and it's not exactly fun to come out of college with a four-year degree and say, I don't really want to do this.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

Yeah. More than that, one of the big things we do is we show STEM professionals that they look up to. Most of us don't have linear paths. So I start off by telling them my STEM story. How I went to college in the early 90s and I wanted to do genetic engineering because I really like the author Robin Cook. And I learned about MIT from head of the class, and I thought, okay, I'll go there. So I went to that school and realized, no, I don't want to work on one gene for the rest of my life. I actually don't want to do this, but I love science. What can I do? So I was able to through graduate school and through figuring out a lot of things that I didn't want to do. I figured that my space is actually, I'm a great person who creates scientists. I'm a science cheerleader. I am a person who's great at writing grants. I hold space so that people can learn to do these things. It's a nonlinear path that is built on figuring out what is a yes, what is a no, and navigating those terms and figuring out that you can keep going if you ask those questions, what works for me? So we start with our individual STEM stories as the instructors and facilitators of this program, but then we get down to helping the student create their own STEM story. We do this through a series of exercises. They actually have to identify a STEM professional in their community and interview them. This is breaking the seal. So we're trying to teach those skills that will also help them be successful as they go to college. Scary sometimes to talk to a professor. So let's have you do this. Let's have you interview them about their STEM story in a safer kind of place. We run small groups by near-peer mentors. So these are undergraduate students who are very much like our high school students, talking about what they thought things were going to be like, but what they actually are. And so our high school students then see that our undergraduates still are kind of navigating that pathway to figure out what's next. So our students then end with the beginning of their college essay because they have their STEM story so far in what they think is coming next. They have developed the thought process. They've developed a map, a resilience map. So one of the skills we talk about is failing forward. So that is very difficult for our high school students who are so focused on achievement. They see that opening the doors to these Ivy League schools, highly competitive schools that they really want is about getting the best grades, winning all the STEM competitions, you know, never being wrong. But we all know that the foundations of science and engineering are based on failing. The scientific method is based on failure. So how does it feel when you've had your whole entire life so far being about achievement and being perfect to step into a lab and you're failing, or step into a class and you're failing? That's where learning happens in that iterative process. That's where discovery happens, but it feels bad because it is exactly what you tried not to do for so your whole life. Yeah. For your whole life. So we talk a lot about failing forward and how failure is an opportunity to grow. We talk about asset-based mindset. So the importance of reframing things to think about what you've learned, what you have, instead of where you've fallen short or what you don't have. We talk about resilience mapping. So resilience, you know, is you're this whole like you get knocked down, you get up again. Yeah. And our students are all looking for these mentors to help them through this process. But what we talk about is mentorship is not just one person. Yeah. So you're going to want a different mentor in all of these different areas. So we help them build a resilience map where they can identify who and what resources they can turn to for a variety of different problems or questions they run into. So for example, if you have a financial issue, who are you going to go talk to? If you have a career pathway issue, who are you going to go talk to? If you are just trying to figure out how to navigate the enrollment system at your university, who would you go to? If you have a personal like relationship issue, who can you go to? So by proactively thinking about this and giving them a structure that they can fill out as they go to different phases in their life, our hope is that when something happens, they don't feel like they have no resources. They can turn to something that they physically wrote down and have that as a reference material to help them, you know, move on.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Donna, I want to be best friends with you because your brain works with my brain.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

I can be best friends with you too. I actually think this is the most impactful work I've ever done.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Oh my gosh. I'm so jealous. But this is literally what I'm attempting to do as the State League for Gifted. Like our high school kids don't know what it's like to fail at all, and they're not surviving it well. They're not.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

So this is the thing about doing this under the Army Educational Outreach Program. This is a for the public program. So participation in all of our initiatives is absolutely free. We also incentivize completion by providing a siphon for the students. Everything is free for them. And ideally, the students who complete STEM foundations, oh, I forgot to tell you, we open up this opportunity for the students who were not selected for the internships. So they applied and they were not selected. So then we say, now this opportunity is available for you. So what happens is overnight, over the first weekend, we got 500 applications, you know, that come in for STEM foundations because the students are hungry. They're hungry for something to do. And then they all are kind of shocked when they actually get into the program because I tell them it's reflective, it's this process. And some of them are still trying to tell me what, tell their instructors what they think we want to hear. And we stop them with that. Some students hate it. They don't want to be there because it's completely different than what they've done in the past. But for those who get it, it's transformative. It's life-changing work. And what we found this year, I wasn't expecting it this summer, is we had all of the scientists that came and spoke, all the professionals, scientists, engineers, variety of different jobs spoke. They cannot see the high school students because we follow youth protection protocols. So they're basically speaking to a blank screen, but they get tons and tons of questions. And they said the big question we asked this summer was what is your why? Why do you do the work that you do? And so when I watched all these professionals reflecting on this, they got back to something that was so authentic to who they are. And at a point where so many folks have been impacted by what's happening with workforce right now, they said that it was so important for them to reflect on their why and that it was meaningful to talk to young people, just starting their career pathways and thinking about their why and how important that would have been to them.

Andrew 15:01

I can't even begin to explain to you, Donna, how full my page is with notes and how impressive this whole thing is. And I'm like, how come I didn't get all this? How come I missed all this? I mean, I'm I'm so excited for our listeners to be able to hear this. One of the things that really stood out to me is that this work, it's almost hard to measure the impact from this work and that you all are coming at it from an abundance mentality, not a scarcity mentality, because it might not pay off in a in a specific way where you're like, oh well, this this led to this, but you're helping individuals advancing them and determining who they are as people, what they want to be about, and who they want to be. And I think what I'm hearing is this is an opportunity to kind of explore in a more holistic manner and then navigate your way to where maybe your skill set or your interest drive you. And it sounds like a big career playground. Like, let's just get onto it. Let's let's have some experiences and see where you go. It's a way to understand yourself more. I also heard you use the term of reflection, which I think is so critical for us as human beings. We will think about our experience and not just have things happen to us, but we can be part of navigating it to where we want it to go.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

You say you have thousands of people applying. So obviously the word's getting out there, but how do either more people learn about it? So if they're not accepted, they can still do these things, or is it coming from teachers? So, how are people learning about this program?

SPEAKER_02 16:31

We're just at the beginning. So we it's been kind of a surprise program so far. You know, you apply, you didn't get into your internship. Surprise, we have STEM foundations for you. Let's see how this goes. We just are starting a new chapter for AEOP. So we have a new consortium coming together. We're really excited that RIT, my organization, was selected to lead this new consortium. NSTA is also a critical partner in the consortium. With this new organization, we'll be together for 10 years. And the Army believed so much in STEM foundations and what we had done in the pilot phase that they've written it in to the consortium. It will be offered moving forward and ideally it will grow. And we've proposed doing this in partnership with our teacher program. So the teacher program was formerly known as Reset. It's now called the Teacher Fellows Program. And this is for K-12 teachers who do STEM and they get paid to do research with Army scientists and engineers in the summer. There are several different levels of this program. Jennifer Meadows, she facilitates this initiative out of Tennessee Tech University, and we'll be at the NSTA conference in booth 551 together. So hopefully you'll come and stop by and see us. The teachers, last summer, we hired teachers who had been through Reset to help us facilitate at the higher level the STEM Foundations program. So that was really exciting because they had had the experience working in the laboratories, doing the research. They are used to working with high school and middle school students. And so they helped us facilitate all of the reflection together and they also learn from the process of what we were doing. So hopefully we'll be growing in our opportunity to getting curriculum out there so other folks can replicate this in their clubs, in their schools, in whatever element, so that we can keep this thought process going. I think that when we build STEM professionals, we have to remember that we're not just teaching skills. We're helping to shape people. And it's those people elements, you know, especially when we think of the world of AI right now, those people elements, developing those are so important. It's intentional that we call it STEM foundations because thinking of yourself as a human, as a full person, as a someone with values, as someone who's come from somewhere, right? So how has where you grown up, the family you're from, shaped who you are, shaped what's important to you? How has your vision of what your family life is going to look like shaped what you want to do? So for example, if you are going to be a young parent, you might not be able to be in a lab overnight doing research, you know? So that might be something simple that that shapes you. Maybe your physical abilities don't have you standing all day. So you need to take that into consideration when you're thinking of the career that's the best fit for you. So they're all different things. You maybe you're a person who wants to be service-minded with your work. Maybe you're a person who really cares about your bank account. So those are decision factors that should shape your job choice.

Andrew 19:42

Donna, I am so excited that you mentioned AI. And not because I wanted to work AI in the conversation, but I was literally thinking about this as you were explaining this because you mentioned more than one thing, but one of them was the human element. And as you were talking, you were talking so much about life skills, just life as a human being, those skills, those power skills that we need. Like a little bit ago in this conversation, I was like, I want to talk about how you're already prepared to launch an AI, and you actually did that on your own without me talking about it. Because as an organization, I built this foundation that in a lot of ways was prepared for this because the one of the most important aspects is the human element, or we're talking about artificial intelligence, and you already did it for me. So, as co-host of the show, thank you for navigating the conversation. Well, I was I was hoping it would go. We are very excited to connect with you at Anaheim for the NSDA conference. We're excited to see you in the expo hall. Connect with you. We also will be there recording live from the expo hall. Awesome. For our listeners, make sure that you stop in and and visit the expo hall. See all that it has to offer visiting AEOP and also your favorite podcast, NSTA voices. Thank you for coming on the show, Donna.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

Thank you, Donna. Thank you. Thank you for inspiring me today. I appreciate it. Can't wait to see everybody in Anaheim and stop by booth 551. We can't wait to see you.