Energy Fellows Program

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We bring low-income high school students to an interactive STEM workshop on energy and the environment to enhance classroom education, engage in hands-on learning, and teach business etiquette skills.

Standings & Awards

307 out of 422 in North America
362 out of 779 in Education
69 out of 173 in Scale
949 out of 992 in Charitable
1940 out of 4003 Overall

37

VOTES

The EFP uses a professional conference as a marketplace for students to experience cross-disciplinary STEM.

The EFP has three goals: contextualize and supplement classroom STEM energy-related education; prepare students for collegiate study through project-based learning; and provide an environment to learn and practice professional and academic etiquette skills. The EFP leverages support from local Teach for America (TFA) corps members, matriculation is free for students, and food and transportation are provided.

The program begins with an Etiquette Dinner, which brings participants to MIT’s campus for a business dinner with a focus on cohort building. The dinner teaches basic etiquette including formal introductions, dress codes and dining protocols and ends with an interactive lesson on energy concepts using relevant examples. The lesson begins with a focus on underlying science, but quickly shows how real-world problems require expertise across disciplines. Diverse undergraduate volunteers participate as role models and mentors.

The core of the program is a two-day project-based exploration of energy modeled after a professional conference held in conjunction with the MIT Energy Conference. Students are assigned to research teams, each representing different sources of energy generation (e.g. oil, coal, solar) and are coached by field experts. Through hands-on activities, games, supplemental materials, and mini-demonstrations, students discuss energy generation science principles, real-world advantages and implementation challenges, and concepts of cost, scale, and impacts on human safety and welfare. Participants are also introduced to how scientific and societal issues are discussed and presented in government, industry, and academia. Students attend a conference panel and have lunch with conference organizers and speakers. The workshop culminates with a showcase competition, where teams lobby for their energy source using a formal technique such as poster presentation or debate.

The EFP has demonstrated two successful pilot years at MIT, engaging over 100 students, boasting a 100% TFA teacher retention rate, and gaining the support of the Siemens Foundation and the MIT Office of Education Outreach. It is our hope that we can leverage energy and education networks to create a chapter-based model of the EFP in partnership with other academic institutions. Together with the TFA community, energy clubs across the country can share experiences and resources to conduct their own EFP conferences in order to reach a greater number and diversity of students.

FIVE PROJECT QUESTIONS Required (60 - 90 minutes)

1. What is your innovation?

Our innovation is our use of a professional conference as a marketplace of ideas to engage high school students and enhance both etiquette skills and classroom STEM education. While most STEM programs target already highly achieving students, the EFP targets any student that could benefit from contextualizing science-based problems in society. With our programming, we have developed a way to create the first interdisciplinary marketplace for STEM education, communication and youth engagement.

2. Who gains the most?

Our students benefit from the venue and framework of a professional conference to empower awareness, participation, motivation and communication. Students also benefit from exposure to college students, campus life, and mentors in STEM fields. Meanwhile, campus groups benefit from the experience and knowledge of an established outreach program with a focus on teaching; teachers benefit from the contextualization of their course content as well as knowledge about energy issues from experts.

3. Who pays?

A significant challenge to scaling the EFP is raising money in a sustainable manner. As we scale, raising funds is a burden that university chapters may not be equipped to handle. Our vision is to designate a headquarter chapter that is responsible for fundraising and resource allocation on a national level. Dollars can then be raised from private companies with an interest in STEM education, philanthropic foundations whose missions aligns with ours, crowdsourcing, and education-based grants.

4. What is your success?

Our success is creating a unique educational program that has reached over 100 students and has a defined roadmap for future growth. From our experience, we have defined explicit goals; benefited from feedback from teachers, volunteers and students; and iterated on the initial vision of the program. Our future success is scaling this demonstrated program to other universities, addressing challenges of locality, fundraising, and resource-sharing to streamline the growth process for the long term.

5. How will you do it?

Our focus has been on development and execution of the EFP using the framework of the MIT Energy Conference. We will continue to host the EFP but also emphasize efforts to scale. Our first priority is to work with early adopters at peer institutions to share our experience and resources. Our second effort is centralizing fundraising efforts based on continued metric-dependent donations. Seed funding will allow us to address these goals serially, which is crucial for our student-run organization.