Annika Viswesh – Spring 2021 Award Recipient
Our next Get Involved Award recipient for the spring session is Annika Viswesh, a current junior in the Bay Area. For her service project, she created Jobs of Tomorrow, a career education program for middle and high school students with a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math. The mission is to improve equity in STEM by encouraging underrepresented groups including students of color, girls, students from low-income groups, and students with disabilities to consider STEM.
Annika was always drawn towards STEM and she has participated in science fairs at the local, state, and national levels. However, at these science fairs, she discovered a lack of participation of certain groups of people and was disheartened to learn that this lack of equity was due to a dearth of role models and resources. As a result, she got the idea to create Jobs of Tomorrow, a program that would expose others to STEM careers.
Her journey with Jobs of Tomorrow began with Get Involved Foundation, where she was able to use design thinking to understand the audience and better work with them. She was also introduced to Ms. Cheadle and various students in her target audience. Through these resources, Annika started a program that invited speakers in various career fields to talk to students in East Palo Alto. After all these sessions, Annika found that she was inspired by the way students were able to get involved and interact with the speakers at each event, which has encouraged her to continue hosting events.
Since 2018, Annika has organized 42 live professional STEM talks, webinars, workshops, and panels in various places ranging from Haiti to East Palo Alto. Before COVID-19, she hosted sessions in the Ravenswood School District and Mountain View School District. Due to COVID-19, she had to reconsider how to keep Jobs of Tomorrow going. But, even with these challenges, Annika found ways to bring her career talks online and expanded her talks to a global audience in places like Zimbabwe.
In an interview with Get Involved board members, Annika stated that the most memorable part of all of her programs was receiving feedback from students and modifying the program to meet their needs. She is so grateful for the opportunity to speak with students and get to know them, and through this, she has learned much about barriers in the STEM field. Especially in Haiti, when students attended a meeting even in the middle of a hurricane, Annika learned just how much it mattered to others to be able to hear from people that they could personally identify with.
From Jobs of Tomorrow, Annika has learned how to keep an open mind and adapt to various situations. During the lockdown, Annika learned how to adjust to moving her programs online. During one session in Haiti, the connection kept on dropping, so Annika found a way for the speaker to record and conduct Q&A in an alternative manner. Now, when she comes across unplanned situations, she can face them and learn from them.
Annika hopes that through Jobs of Tomorrow, students will be inspired to pursue STEM education at the college level and contribute to the STEM community to solve some of the world's pressing problems. In the future, she hopes to expand on Jobs of Tomorrow to areas like office tours or sessions for specific groups of people. She hopes that in the next couple of months, some of her ideas can become a reality. See more about her project here: https://www.jobsoftomorrow.org/. View her interview with Get Involved here.