Synthesizing Interviews

Since everyone did 5-8 interviews, we each shared our interviews with one another, and we wrote up any thoughts that we had as we were sharing. We synthesized them all to try to get insights and turn those into points of view. The interviews and synthesis happened between 4/20 and 4/25.

We found:

• Personal Characteristics



• high self confidence was important, so we could help kids feel encouraged
• the desire for a job was important, so we could show parents the benefits of encouraging their kids in science. One specific subset of this was students that wanted to keep their options open. There was a perception that a scientist can engage in the social sciences or humanities later in life but that it was harder to do the reverse.
• Some students thought of themselves as uncreative and went into engineering because they thought thought it was just following rules, which didn't require creativity. Some students thought of themselves as creative and went into engineering because they thought that it was creative. I can empathize with both groups: in high school, I never thought of myself as creative until I expressed as much to one of my friends, which prompted them to list off all of the ways that I was creative. I still didn't think of it as part of my identity, but the foot was in the door. When I took my first computer science class, Mehran Sahami immediately talked about how computer science was a creative activity and every solution had a unique style, and then I started identifying as creative and as an engineer.
• Some students thought that science was difficult or challenging, so they went into it because they thought that smart kids did. Some kids saw it as difficult or challenging, so they stayed away from it because they were scared.
• Some students thought that science was cooperative. Others thought that it was competitive. Different students liked and disliked each of these approaches.
• Many students who went into science and engineering identified themselves as good at math or science from a young age. This was not completely correlated with getting good grades in math and science: we were interviewing Stanford students, so most got good grades in math and science, but they still didn't identify as good at those subjects. We couldn't find any one characteristic that led students to incorporate math and science as a part of their identity.
• Some students were 'big picture' thinkers. These students were attracted by the social implications of technology ("Microsoft is in Seattle because they can more easily cool their data centers? Writing faster code saves energy? Who controls the algorithm that controls what information I see online?") and by science courses where they could understand how everything fit together (classes that involved building or understanding biological systems; less so with chemistry, which seemed more like memorization). This contrasts with many pre-med students who are fine with memorization.
• Community + Parents



• high parental support in STEM was important, so we could help parents provide tech support. Doing stuff with parents also facilitated bonding.
• take your kid to work day
• doing experiments with parents -- "Dad know how to do everything!"
• having computers in the house and parents involved in computer science led to kids deciding on CS from a very young age. Similarly, exposure to Shakespeare from an early age led to kids loving english. Early experiences had a long lasting effect.
• Most parents that did hands-on or technical activities with their kids had technical backgrounds.
• Activities
• hands on experiences were important, so we could try to use those and do things like suggest building projects.
• Lots of kids loved science kits, science fairs, science camps, take your kid to work day, and building stuff. Legos had a strong place.
• we were still interested in captive audiences
• the tangible results of their efforts were important. They wanted to point to what they did. What is 'tangible' differed among our interviewees. For instance, most computer scientists that we interviewed said that they thought that CS was tangible and that they could point to what they did, whereas non-computer-scientists often said that physical projects were easier to point to.
• There were different descriptions of the desired type of activity. Some wanted new or novel projects and others wanted to fix stuff. Some wanted a specific subject area (for instance, an earth scientist that loved going on hikes and biking around since he was a kid).
• Significant life experiences got kids interested in STEM. For instance, an athlete broke his leg and got interested in medicine.
• Society + School



• science/technology entertainment was important. This was true of non science media too -- an aspiring engineer switched to political science after watching West Wing. We could make a new media product in the style of Star Wars or Bill Nye, or we could make science/technology toys or games that we could market alongside existing science media.
• Having a good teacher in a STEM area was important. With a good teacher, even negative reinforcement can work
• School was boring for many. Boring experiences in physics research turned one person from physics to english. For others, high school was boring, but in college, they could finally have classes that matched their interests. For instance, a bad CS teacher in high school led one student to "vow to never take a computer science class again." Then, after taking a CS class at Stanford, they stayed in CS.

Our whiteboards: