• Question: After finding out a bit more about you,I find that you are passionate about trying to encourage girls and women to consider STEM in their future.Is there a particular reason that your so passionate about this topic?

    Asked by anon-258105 to Tiffany on 29 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Tiffany Chan

      Tiffany Chan answered on 29 Jun 2020: last edited 29 Jun 2020 12:57 pm

      Hi Misba! I was lucky enough to go to a school that really pushed STEM and had the resources to do so, and I’ve always tried to ‘give back’ as I know not everyone is as fortunate as I was. I’m keen on encouraging as many young people to get into STEM as possible – not just girls – and I’ve worked with many outreach programmes to try and do this. However, there remains a lack of girls in STEM, particularly in engineering disciplines, and so it’s extra important that we try to highlight to girls in particular that a career in STEM is one that they should consider. Things are definitely changing with time (there are many more females studying STEM subjects at undergraduate level, compared to the amount of females that are at professor level), but I still think that society sees certain subjects as being more ‘male-aligned’ than others – and this is something we need to continue to work at! (for example, at my school, there were 10x more girls studying biology than physics, even though it was an all-girls school!)

Comments

  • Photo: anon-258105

    anon-258105 commented on :

    Thanks @Tiffany Chan for replying

    Iā€™m so grateful

  • Photo: Aisling

    Aisling commented on :

    This is such a lovely question, Misba! I think most women in STEM (well any women I have met anyway!) are very passionate about encouraging young girls to pursue science. I am passionate about it because I grew up thinking that science was a man’s job, or a job for crazy genius people who spend all of their time reading etc. But I soon found out that is not the case!! Science is just like any other job where you meet every sort of person. And you don’t have to be a straight A student to be a scientist. You just need to find a part of science that really interests you. I only found this part of science that really interests me when I was 16 and was taught chemistry as a separate subject from biology and physics in school. I quickly realised that I found chemistry to be really interesting, even though up until then I thought I hated science! Of course science isn’t for everyone but even if you don’t become a scientist you can still be interested and remain involved in science throughout you life – science is everywhere and everything!! šŸ™‚

  • Photo: anon-258105

    anon-258105 commented on :

    Thanks @ Aisling for replying
    Iā€™m so grateful