Dear women in STEM,
‘Tis the season for caffeine-induced mornings, quiet days in the library, and all-nighters. Your hair is tied up so tightly that you physically cannot close your eyes to sleep. The finish line is so close that all you can think about is handing in that last exam and walking out of the lecture hall not having to worry about elements, derivatives, or labs for two weeks. During these last couple academic weeks of the Fall 2022 semester, you may look around and ask yourself: How did I get here?
For some, you may have had the puppet strings of STEM tied around you from the moment any sort of your personality formed. Your options were becoming a doctor, rocket scientist, or nothing at all. Hours spent sitting at the dinner table doing math homework and extra Kumon classes were normal and expected. You were doing your best but barely keeping your head above water. Other girls may have been “naturally gifted”. You could add up fractions faster than anybody else, and the preconceived route for you was to keep going, to keep excelling. Academic validation courses through your veins and fuels your fire. There are those who took a genuine interest in STEM for no reason other than that they enjoyed it. The reins were offered to you, and you did not have to accept. You liked how rocks formed and how the unit circle worked and had positive encouragement to pursue your interests. Regardless of the journey, no matter how easy or difficult, we are all at our common destination. We have made it.
Other girls once stood where we are now. The fields of the sciences, technologies, engineering, and mathematics were male-only areas at one point in time, a time that was not long ago. The doors were locked for girls, so they had to charge through them, unpick the locks, or climb in through the windows. These girls had to light the torches that brighten our paths and allow us to simply walk through the doors that were shut for them. We stand on the shoulders of History written by other women, and it is our job to pass it along. The important thing we need to remember is that it is not the responsibility of just one girl; we all bear the obligation to carry the stories of those before us together.
Taking classes with such heavy workloads can be terrifying. The material is complex, the labs are lengthy, and the calculations are no walk in the park. It can be daunting at times, and you may feel so isolated, but I am certain that you are not the only one who feels that way. You have an entire crowd of girls on your side. Women who are doctors, technicians, and chemists who once held that torch and passed it down to those studying to be engineers, developers, and professors of the world. One day it will be up to us to take the torch that we possess and pass it down to the future dentists, mathematicians, and programmers. We will take what we learnt from our experiences, good and bad, and share them with the next generation of women in STEM. It is up to us to help them understand why they were able to study in a STEM program, how their journey counts, and that they are still allowed to have interests outside of the walls of their field.
In case nobody told you today: I am proud of how far you have come, and though I may not have personally met you, thank you for supporting me like how I support you.
Love,
A woman in STEM