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One8 Applied Learning Hub Presents

Student Industry Connects

Students are eager to learn from you!

SIGN-UP TO VOLUNTEER

How it works

1. Sign up as an industry expert volunteer!

Click here to sign-up to review student work and provide written feedback. You’ll create an account (or log in if you’ve volunteered previously) and provide information about your background and interests, so that we can best match you with relevant projects. Submissions will encompass work from students in grades 5-12 along three STEM pathways: engineering, computer science, and biomedical science.

2. Share your expertise on student work February 21-March 1!

On Wednesday, February 21, you’ll receive an email with your assigned projects for review and judging guidelines. You’ll have ~10 projects to review, expected to take about 3 hours in total. Reviews are conducted completely on your schedule, guided by the online judging portal. All feedback is due by 5 pm on Friday, March 1, so we can share it with students and teachers the following week.

3. Optional Connect with students and teachers live (virtually)!

When signing up as an industry expert judge, you can also choose to become a virtual classroom visitor. In March, you’ll be matched with a middle or high school STEM teacher whose students submitted work online and continue the industry connection in a powerful way.  You’ll spend 30-60 minutes a session engaging with students, sharing insights about your career path and what makes your profession so interesting.

Students find industry feedback meaningful, motivating, and validating. But don’t take it from us.

Hear directly from students about their experiences receiving real-world feedback from industry professionals.

Are you ready to impact students by sharing your expertise and providing feedback?

Sign-up! (Link opens in a new tab)

Previous Student Submissions

This is the type of feedback and experience I want for my students but have little bandwidth to coordinate myself. It makes a big difference."

PLTW High School Engineering Teacher

Meet fellow STEM Professional Volunteers

STEM professionals just like you have been engaging with students across MA, reviewing their work and virtually visiting classrooms. Meet just a few of them below.

 

Marissa Petersile

Sustainability Specialist, National Grid

“I work at National Grid, where we delivery electricity and gas to homes and businesses across New England. I have a degree in electrical engineering along with an MBA, and at National Grid I have worked in a handful of departments, such as Transmission Planning, Emergency Planning, and Sustainability (where I work now!).”

Jillian Bejtlich

Lead Community Strategist, BAE Systems

“I’m a community architect and strategist meaning that it’s my job to build digital environments where groups of people come together to learn, share, and collaborate on all sorts of topics. Students use these online environments all the time in places like Stack Overflow, Reddit, gaming forums, and even parts of Facebook.

Building a successful digital environment requires a lot of understanding of how people behave, what drives us to do what we do, and how design impacts behavior. Once we’re up and running, I use a ton of math to understand what community users are doing and if I can improve the experience by making design or functionality changes. Often times my work dives into big data and predictive analytics – especially if we’re trying to figure out what’s going to happen before it even happens. My job even requires dealing with hackers, spam bots, real life trolls, and all sorts of crazy unwelcome behavior that people like me have to stop so our community users don’t feel unwelcome or attacked.

In order to do the job I do, I have to be equal parts communicator, coder, artist, psychologist, and data nerd. It’s an interesting job packed to the brim with STEM aspects, but also a lot of attributes that we don’t usually think of when we picture someone who works in STEM.”

Ayushi Sinha

Scientist, Philips Research

“I’m a scientist at Philips Research in Cambridge, MA, working on making difficult procedures easier for surgeons! I work in the Image Guided Therapy group here, so the projects I’m involved with center around medical procedures that use some kind of image guidance. The main project I’m involved in right now focuses on providing guidance (e.g., with X-ray images acquired during the procedure) in performing small lung lesion biopsies in order to help in the early detection of lung cancer. I’m also involved with a project that revolves around generating intellectual property or patents which involves brainstorming with experts in the field, identifying problems, and coming up with solutions that are unique or patentable.”

Tsega Birkneh

Education Specialist, Microsoft

“My name is Tsega and I currently work for Microsoft in the retail sales. I have been working for Microsoft for about two years now. I went to school at Northeastern University for Criminal Justice and Psychology and minor in Computer Science, after graduating from Boston College High school for High School. As a student who went through the Boston Public Schools system up to 8th grade, I have always wished for such an opportunity where STEAM was something I was able to partake in because it’s such a valuable thing in life especially for young adults. That’s why I have taken it upon myself to be part of Mass STEM HUB and help in any way I can. That way I am at least playing a roll in providing what I never had to the generation that’s coming up and help them in ways I wish I was helped and guided.”

Thank you to our partners for powering Student Industry Connects:

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