Fostering More Women in STEM. Let’s Get Involved! 

Nvolve Science & Technology Program: Real-world Experiential Learning

By Aria Moss, Sophomore, Northern Virginia Community College Student

The Science and Technology Program at Nvolve gives scholars the opportunity to conduct technical projects and develop real-world technical and communication skills. Nvolve’s Director of Science & Technology Projects, Dr. Hermioni Zouridis, has worked with Nvolve since its conception in the summer of 2020 and joined the leading of the technical program, developing the projects available to the scholars and guiding them as a project coach. 

The goal of the technical program is to empower scholars in a variety of ways. Dr. Zouridis says she hopes to “encourage the scholars to work in major technological megatrends, to create LinkedIn-level work outputs, and to work on it in a way that mirrors how things get done in the real world.” In other words, the goal is to provide the experience of working on a real-world project with a tangible result to display. 

This semester there are four options available to scholars: a podcast about a STEM topic of their choice, a data visualization project that involves the creation of an interactive dashboard, design and development of a mental wellness app for college students, and a research project that involves analyzing a high-throughput biological dataset to examine how a particular gene of interest behaves in breast cancer. Each project not only helps the scholars practice project management but also emphasizes working in teams to identify the steps and skills needed to solve real-world problems, systematically working toward that goal in collaboration with an industry-expert coach, and communicating their work in ways that are accessible and easy to digest. 

In the future, Dr. Zouridis aims to expand the technical program as Nvolve grows, recruiting and working with more “coaches that are real-world industry experts.” Beyond that, she plans to provide more options for scholars who are deciding which project they want to engage with. That could mean continuing the biomarkers project, using off-the-shelf AI to solve a problem, or designing and producing a physical object. “I’d like to come up with a variety of projects,” she says, so that every scholar can benefit from this hands-on learning in the STEM fields they love most. After all, the ultimate goal is to learn something new, and as she says, “learning is just a by-product of doing.”

MoodZen: Encouraging Self-awareness and Calming Strategies for College Students

By Jenna Mehls, Junior, University of Maryland College Park Student

Exciting news! Nvolve is developing and releasing an app! For the past three months, the Nvolve App Team has been diligently working to conceptualize and innovate our own mental health app. In February we began with hundreds of ideas rummaging through the heads of both Nvolve scholars and industry experts. Our first meeting was used to define and understand team roles, group responsibilities, and deadlines. Shortly after, the market research group set out to understand the features and components of mental health apps that already resided on the market, while looking for details to include and problems to avoid in our own app. After the market research investigation, the content development group got to work. They narrowed down the objectives of our app - focusing on “feeling overwhelmed” with an audience of college students. After a few rounds of revisions, the team also organized how the app will specifically help the user, along with the flow of the user’s path. The content development group then handed it over to the User Experience (UX) team to work on developing the wireframes and visuals of the app. Meanwhile, the analytics and marketing teams were hard at work to prepare the app for launch. Just this past month, we decided to name the app MoodZen! We are excited to give college students a tool for labelling their emotions when feeling overwhelmed, offering activities to reduce stress, and encouraging self-awareness and confidence. We hope you download MoodZen in May!

Experienced Technical Coaches Facilitate Experiential Learning at Nvolve

By Sherri Boyd

Nvolve simulates real-world experience by enabling scholars to design, implement, publish, and present research and technical projects. This would not be possible without the ten experienced professionals who volunteer as technical coaches to help guide their discoveries. One of these coaches is Karen Palino, Director of Cloud Technology at Deltek. Ms. Palino has recently joined the Nvolve community and is advising a Data Visualization project which is studying changes in energy use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ms. Palino sees tremendous value in Nvolve’s experiential learning program. She notes that the scholars are “fostering several skills at once, since the projects require collaboration, teamwork and problem solving, all of which successful professionals use regularly.” Stella Munuo, Senior Director of Capability and Operations at AstraZeneca, is also a technical coach for a Data Visualization project which is building a dashboard using Tableau. Ms. Munuo describes experiential learning at Nvolve as a “sandbox or safe space to build new skills or hone existing ones.” One of the favorite experiences with her team of scholars occurred when they “opted to proceed with a topic aligned to their passion instead of the suggested topic.” The team had a solid hypothesis and vision, but they did not have a well-defined data set. Although Ms. Munuo had concerns about data availability, she empowered the scholars to address the challenge. The team was “able to divide and conquer the end-to-end processes while connecting on a weekly basis amongst themselves to iron out kinks,” leading to a successful outcome. Nvolve’s technical program can also benefit scholars as they begin to interview for internships, full-time jobs, or graduate school, since interviewers often ask for real-world examples. As Ms. Palino points out, “these types of projects are excellent examples” which Nvolve scholars can confidently use to highlight their skills and experiences.

Data Visualization:  COVID-19 Effects on Major Airports Flights

By Sherri Boyd

During the Fall’21 semester Nvolve scholars, Armita Shahmor and Shiqiong Lu, wanted to apply their newly acquired Tableau skills to a real-world problem, so they decided to partner on a Data Visualization project. Both scholars are students at University of Maryland: Armita, a Network Engineering and Cyber Security major at its Global Campus and Shiqiong, an Information Science major at College Park. “We were curious to see how COVID-19 has affected the airline industry,” says Armita, so they analyzed data pre-pandemic and post-pandemic to see the changing patterns in the domestic flights. According to Shiqiong, their biggest challenge arrived early in the process, as it was difficult to find the right dataset. The scholars had to familiarize themselves with the Bureau of Transportation database, and then extract, clean, and prepare the data for Tableau. The result was a successful dashboard showcasing their analysis, along with a technical report presenting their findings. The lessons learned along the way encompassed both team collaboration and technical skills. Armita appreciated the experience of working on a project from start-to-finish, while managing a timeline and working as a team to meet the deadline. When asked about the value of this assignment, Shiqiong says the project “sharpened my analytical and Tableau skills which is a must for my future goal as a data engineer or software developer.” Please check out COVID-19 Effects on Major Airports Airline Flights here.