Program areas at The Social Engineering Project
Science in the City ("SITC") is a week-long summer day camp at Stanford University for incoming 5th and 6th grade underrepresented students of color. SITC was created through a joint partnership with Stanford University Graduate School of Education's Science in the City Research Group and The Social Engineering Project, Inc. Approximately 50 students are exposed to hands-on, culturally relevant, chemistry, physics, and engineering experiments to spark an interest in STEM-related courses throughout high school and college. SITC's goal is for students to fall in love with STEM, go to college, major in a STEMrelated major, and work in the technology sector.
Family Science Days/Nights: Our goal is to provide free Family Science Days (?FSD?) throughout the school year to reinforce some of the scientific principles that we expose our students to and create a support group within families to continue to foster a love for math, science, technology, and engineering. Many of our students have siblings that do not attend our other programs, so we provide family-friendly science activities for our students and their relatives. FSNs are typically hosted at a tech company's headquarters and they teach our students something about their products or services. Moreover, TSEP provides resources for parents separately so that they can best support their children to pursue STEM-related careers throughout their academic life. This past year, Google hosted us at its headquarters.
TSEP Overnight Camping Conference is a weekend-long conference for high school students of color throughout Northern California designed to motivate and inspire them to go to college, pursue a STEM major and related career, learn about work/life balance through hiking, mindfulness and yoga, entrepreneurship, personal branding, and how to network effectively. TSEP takes over 100, 9th-12th low-income, marginalized, underrepresented high school students of color camping via buses from San Jose, Oakland, and Sacramento to the wilderness. The students are free of the typical technological distractions (there is no cellular signal, no internet connectivity, no texting or WiFi) and become one with nature.