Students gather around Chemistry Club’s booth to make DIY popping boba.
Borden Gymnasium (Borden) bustled with chatter and excitement as students toured the booths of several clubs during Andover’s inaugural STEM Night. Coordinated by members of the Phillips Academy Robotics Club (PARC), the event last Friday invited fifteen STEM-related clubs to introduce themselves, arranging a space for interested students to sign up for clubs ahead of the larger club fair.
STEM Night was primarily organized by Hayley Fan ’29, Ryan Zhu ’29, and Grace Zheng ’28, all of whom are involved in PARC and other STEM clubs. Fan elaborated on the rationale behind hosting the event.
“The club fair is so big. So many clubs, so many people milling around in Snyder, and each club, each booth, only gets max a couple of minutes of attention. The problem with that is STEM clubs are instruction, demonstration, and help based… When I first came here, at the club fair, I felt like I missed a lot of stuff. Originally I didn’t sign up for Bio, Chem, or Physics club because I just walked right by them…We wanted to prevent that in our new students and encourage the demonstration aspect of STEM,” said Fan.
Katelin Lewellen, Instructor in Computer Science, shared her perspective as the advisor of the event. She noted the initiative the organizers took throughout the planning, coordination, and communication process.
“Hayley did a lot of work to seek out interest from different clubs and then compile it together and then send a final survey where she got together all of the information and was really great about updating Mr. Capano and myself at various points throughout the process… I played a role in asking some questions and making sure we had our bases covered on various things, and then helping with getting some resources and then being an adult chaperone. But really, most of the organization was student-run, which is an awesome thing that [students] can do at Andover,” said Lewellen.
During the event, numerous clubs featured demonstrations and presentations designed to foster interest and preview their offerings to students. Donatas Vasiliauskas ’28, who is on the board of the Science Olympiad and Chemistry Club, expressed his appreciation for the outreach the event enabled.
“For us, the board members as a whole, I feel like it was a motivating experience, because when you see those people who can help your club in a lot of ways, who are interested in Science Olympiad, we had a lot of people come up with past experiences that would be of great help to our teams… you want to feel that what you’re doing is actually important. It helped [us see] what the people want and how we can help them,” said Vasiliauskas.
For many students, STEM Night served as one of their first opportunities to explore clubs at Andover. Lucas Hernandez ’30 noted how it helped him gain a complete understanding of the various options for exploring STEM at Andover.
“I’ve been involved with STEM clubs in general since middle school. It’s been something fun in my day to look forward to. Going to clubs, meeting with like-minded people, building stuff and projects. The STEM culture here at Andover is well built, and there’s definitely a lot of options for different fields of STEM… I [like this] because it gives you more time to see what they’re about, and you’re not spending as much time at the larger club fair, looking around at the STEM clubs,” said Hernandez.
Christian Estrada ’27, who leads Phillips Academy Paper Exploration and Research Society (PAPERS), mentioned how STEM Night especially benefited his club’s timeline by allowing them to offer students earlier exposure.
“What was really cool about the STEM Night was that it was very early in the year versus the Club Fair in [mid-October]. For PAPERS, because we have that three-term sequence, we want to start as early as possible so students can start thinking about their projects as early as possible. So, we try to have at least one event early on in the year. The STEM Fair was a perfect opportunity for us to gain early interest from a lot of students,” said Estrada.
The event experienced multiple logistical changes throughout the planning process, including a location shift from Snyder Athletic Center to Borden and a scheduling conflict with the Office of Community and Multicultural Development (CAMD) showcase. Lewellen reflected on these as lessons to carry into future implementations.
“We’d like to coordinate better with CAMD so that we’re not on the same night because that was an unfortunate collision. I mean, in one sense, it’s fun to be able to have people go around. But if we were to do that, it’d be nice to be in the same space. Ideally, we’d be on separate nights. We learned some things in terms of organization and supplies. The hope is that we’d be able to continue it in future years,” said Lewellen.
