Angelita Chew

The Curiosity Exchange  Our mission is to enrich the STEM education options for young women and gender minorities by breaking down the cost and social barriers to engaging in STEM. We will achieve this by hosting free STEM focused workshops and classes for local students after school and during school breaks. These classes will be taught by passionate volunteers with experience in STEM, ranging from adult professionals to college/highschool students. By doing this, The Curiosity Exchange will help build a community of STEM minded individuals who want to give back to the community and empower the next generation of girls and gender minorities.  I am passionate about this topic for a number of reasons. To start, from a young age, I was fortunate to have parents that valued getting a well rounded and robust STEM education as it teaches new ways to approach and solve problems. Because of this, I believe it is important to provide additional resources because most girls are not aff...

Upon my first read of the quote, my mind went to improving STEM education for girls. When I was younger, I was fortunate enough to receive supplementary STEM education from a young age through camps and to have parents that valued giving their daughter a STEM centric education. A few years ago I learned, via my robotics team’s volunteer work, that many families often choose to enrich their son’s STEM education by enrolling him in robotics camps and buying him STEM toys. Meanwhile, families with daughters chose to not focus on giving them STEM opportunities because they assumed they were not interested or would not do well in it because of the field’s perceived male dominance and lack of gender equality. Furthermore, most girls felt discouraged from taking an interest in STEM because they felt they had no role models that inspired them in the field. In the “real world” I would like to create more opportunities for young girls to engage in STEM without any cost barrier and to also experi...

Overview & About the Author "Five Surprising Moments in Vaccine History," is a 3 part video series and article by Anna Rothschild that explores the history leading up to our present day form of vaccinations as she discusses the rudimentary methods originally used to combat the highly infectious smallpox, how the anti vax movement started, and germ theory. Rothschild is an on-air journalist with a degree in biology from Brown and a MA in journalism from NYU who covers science and health topics with numerous awards in science journalism. In this series, she confers with various field experts to learn more about the history of vaccinations and the processes that go into their creation. Summaries In the article and first of three videos, Rothschild starts by explaining how the immunization process works as a person’s body works to fight a disease or germ off. In the first video, she explains an early immunization process called variolation, a rudimentary method composed of ex...

Trigger warning: discussions of death of a family member.  Bit of a less happy topic compared to my last random post on emojis but I’ve been thinking about the customs revolving around how people react to death and why certain habits are the way they are. For a little bit of context, I lost my grandfather on my mom’s side last week and we cremated him in Taiwan yesterday (April 2nd). I want to challenge anyone who might respond to this post to not say “I’m sorry for your loss” because while I am sad and am not okay yet after his loss, I want to stop using negative words around his passing.  A random question that has been popping into my head as of late has been why do we say “ I’m sorry for your loss” when we hear that someone else has lost a loved one? I mean no harm when I say this but I feel like when people tell me “I’m sorry,” I never quite know how to respond. What I do know is the remark makes me feel like I need to hyperfixate on the sadness and my negative emotions...