Outreach Events

Achievement First High School students must have a 40-hour internship in order to graduate.  It is part of their effort to get students into professional settings to experience professional responsibilities.  

The students are from Amistad High School which is a very nice new building on Dixwell Ave.  The school has an excellent record of getting kids into college and also helping to support them once they are there.  Probably 90+% of the kids will be first in their family to go to college.  They often don’t know much about the college experience so that is part of what we can offer them.   For example, in previous years the concept of a PhD was not really familiar to our interns.

APS Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) are three-day regional conferences for undergraduate physics majors. The conference empowers numerous undergraduate women to continue physics careers in both industry and academia via alumni mentoring, career and graduate school information sessions, job and internship recruiting fairs, and career development workshops. Yale has hosted 2008-2010; 2012; 2015; and 2020.

Hosted by Graduate Student Women Engineers, Connecticut Students Exploring Engineering Day (CT SEED) is an introduction to engineering for students from across Connecticut. Middle school students are invited to Yale’s campus for a day of hands-on engineering activities and panel discussions on what it’s like to be an engineer. Parents are also invited to join for an information session on encouraging their middle school students to pursue STEM careers.

The Flipped Science Fair (FSF) flips the traditional science fair format on its head: middle school student judges evaluate graduate students and postdocs presenting their current research. Middle school students learn about cutting-edge research from real Yale scientists in a small-group setting, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and participate in hands-on demonstrations. The presenters learn to tailor their research pitch to a general audience, with emphasis on keeping things exciting, understandable, and relevant. Our partnership with Pathways to Science, Yale’s coordinated STEM outreach infrastructure, enables long term tracking of student outcomes to measure the FSF’s effectiveness. Flipped Science Fair was inspired by the Kid’s Judge Neuroscience Fair at UPenn.

The mission of Girls’ Science Investigations is to motivate, empower, and interest girls in developing the skills they need to pursue careers in science. University students and professors act as mentors and provide a context for exploring and understanding the various disciplines of science through hands-on activities in a laboratory environment. Through student scientific-engagement and parental awareness, Girls’ Science Investigations strives to close the gap in science found between males and females today.

It is a free program for girls in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade who are interested in learning more about science. All sessions run from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm (with lunch and snacks provided to the students) in Sloane Physics Lab, 217 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511.

The Granville Academy is a week of diversity and inclusion workshops for undergraduate students doing summer research in astronomy and physics. The Academy is named for Evelyn Boyd Granville, who obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1949 and was the second African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics in the United States. Granville’s long career in research and teaching, including work in celestial mechanics digital computer techniques for the Apollo program, was recognized in 2000 with the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association’s highest honor, the Wilbur Lucius Cross medal.

We develop and incubate open source and disruptive projects that seek to address the most pressing big picture challenges. To navigate such an ambitious mission, we combine interdisciplinary frameworks on holistic thinking to understand complex problems, propose and build solutions designed to catalyze transformational change. We leverage emerging technologies in systems that can harness the power of human collaboration.

Our mission is to provide a decentralized space to research and produce open source projects that represent innovative approaches to complex global challenges. We constantly challenge our processes on how to scale collaboration and use collective intelligence to pursue bold, paradigm-shifting projects.

 

Yale Pathways Summer Scholars is a free two-week summer science program for rising tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade Pathways students. Each summer, Pathways Summer Scholars have the opportunity to select from a variety of STEM workshops collaboratively designed and taught by Yale faculty and graduate students. Summer 2018 offers new topics and workshops, including but not limited to Understanding GMOs - Science, Philosophy, and Dialogue; Disorders of the Brain; and the Chemistry of Beauty.Current Yale undergraduates and graduate students serve a key role as teaching assistants and mentors in the program.

Rising seniors are also eligible to apply to a residential program, living in the Yale student dormitories and taking part in college preparatory programming in addition to attending workshops during the day.

With an overarching goal to encourage and support promising young scholars to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math, Yale Pathways to Science opens the door for middle and high school students to explore STEM at Yale University. The more than 1,800 Pathways to Science Scholars are considered the youngest members of Yale’s scientific community and are invited to Yale’s campus throughout the year for special events, academic lectures, demonstrations, laboratory visits, and research opportunities. Once accepted into the program, students are invited to attend more than 150 different programs and events annually, choosing to participate in the opportunities that interest them most. In the past, students have viewed the cosmos at Yale’s state-of-the-art planetarium, launched rockets, built telescopes, examined brain specimens with Yale neuroscientists, and much more.

The YPO is an all-day (8:30-4:30) physics competition for Connecticut and surrounding area high school students and teachers. Established in 1998 it has taken place annually every year in mid October on a Saturday. Representing their high school or learning institution, students compete in teams of four to complete a pentathlon of different physics-themed activities. Different every year, they can involve: measuring an unknown quantity, optimizing a process, or constructing a device to perform a function. One event is always a quiz consisting of Fermi Problems, that require combining clever quantitative guesses to produce a good final estimate of some unknown number.

In addition to the five competitive events, there is a make-and-take activity for team coaches, a demonstration show (for all participants) and a talk or presentation by a Yale scientist. At the end of the day, in an awards ceremony, teams are awarded first, second and third prizes for best performance in each event. We also award second and third prizes for overall performance and a trophy for best overall performance. We also give out spirit prizes for best costume/T-shirt and best team name.

This event, located at the physics department is free (and includes lunch) for all participants but is capped at 50 teams (including teachers/coaches). Registration is on a first-come-first-served basis and opens in mid to late August. Registration closes two weeks prior to the event date or once 50 teams have registered. For further information, see the link below.

We as an organization aim to ignite scientific engagement across diverse communities and train effective science communicators. To this end, we speak about science at venues ranging from libraries to local bars across New Haven and beyond. As Yale graduate and professional students and postdoctoral scholars, we have a responsibility to make science accessible to the general public, especially to under-served communities. We believe that anyone can engage with science and use it in their lives.

We are a group of graduate students and postdocs at Yale University dedicated to the mission of fostering a scientifically informed electorate, which we pursue through science communication, advocacy, and policy initiatives. In the service of this mission, we pursue several specific initiatives each year with the aim of engaging the public and policymakers in scientific discourse. For more information on our initiatives and activities, check out the What We Do section!

Splash at Yale invites high school and middle school students grades 7-12 to come to the Yale campus and take courses taught by undergraduates on virtually anything. In past programs, we’ve had exciting classes including:

  • Introduction to Improv Comedy
  • Elementary Particle Physics
  • Kafka and Monty Python
  • The Syrian Refugee Crisis
  • Feminism in the Beyonce Era
  • Graph Theory

Splash at Yale is a program organized and run by student-volunteers.

Past Outreach Events

Please click here to see Wright Lab Outreach Events