The Engineering Identity of Afterschool Educators

By Emma Carey

When I first heard about joining science, technology, engineering, and math into the acronym STEM, it just sounded like a list to me. I thought, “That’s nice, that multiple subjects are being taught together. But I still only really like science.” I wondered why these topics were lumped together, and what exactly the connections were among the four subjects, beyond the vague connections of numbers and data. And, why, all of a sudden, did my interest in one subject suddenly mean I might be working with all of them?