The students I taught at an MIT middle school summer camp
So this summer, I was a mentor for DynaMIT. DynaMIT is a fantastic STEM outreach program for middle school students in the Boston area that helps students explore different fields through activities and experiments.
I wanted to share my experience through the lens of 4 kids. 3 of them were 6th-7th graders in my group, and one was a kid so interesting I couldn’t leave him out.
*Will update this daily
Internet videos and medicine
So there’s this kid. Kid #4. Let’s call him Kevin.* He’s unruly (at best) during the lessons, constantly asking when the next snack break is and talking about dank memes and Fortnite instead of participating in activities. He has pretty -interesting- hobbies, like making a video of himself on TikTok eating a small, bitter-tasting crab for $25.
When I talk to him, though, I realize that his ambitions go a little deeper. He also wants to be a surgeon. He says that when he asked his mom what he should do when he grows up at the age of 6, his mom told him “I think you’d make a good surgeon.” At the time, he says, he had thought it was ridiculous. “Surgery, gross!” he exclaims, mimicking his 6-year-old self.
Now, he said, at 13 years old, he’s changed his mind. The thing he wants most in the world is to be a surgeon. Another kid says that he wants to play in the NFL. Kevin, admittedly a bit rudely, shortly says that he wanted to save NFL players’ lives.
Bioengineering and paperclips
The other kids have ambitions as well. One of the students in my group, Oliver, is a particularly odd one out. He wants to be a biomedical engineer, to create prosthetics with his sister, who is entering her senior year of high school.
During one of the exercises, the students in the class are asked to create a large tower out of paperclips, with the promise that the team to construct the largest tower will receive a prize.
The students quickly go to work. One of the teams uses a particularly ingenious method of unbending the paper clips in such a way that their tower, supported well at the bottom and sloping in long metal strands up, ends up easily stretching higher than the other towers.
Within a minute of the challenge starting, however, Oliver has devised a different strategy. He sticks one of the magnets on the top of a door frame, recruits Joseph, another kid from our group, and creates a hanging paperclip tower that merely touches the top of the table it’s supposed to be resting on. At the end, he sits next to his creation on a small desk chair, legs crossed and arms folded contentedly.
Although the instructors verbally said “freestanding structure” and later say the hanging paper clips didn’t count, Oliver was still quite proud of his invention, and I have to say that I am too.
The quiet ones
The other two in the group, Cara and Joseph, are more subdued, preferring to keep to their own instead of interacting with the other kids at the camp. The other mentor at my table is fantastic. He’s funnier than I am and keeps even the quiet ones entertained through a mixture of offbeat jokes and genuine interest in what the kids are doing, engaging even the quiet Cara for some time.
At some point, I ask Cara what she likes to do, and she says she likes to read. “What kind of books,” I ask. “Fantasy,” she says with a smile. Later, Cara has a small Kindle with her. When I look over curiously and ask what’s the title of the book she’s reading, she glances up, shrugs noncommittally, and says “I don’t know.”
Joseph is the quietest out of the table. When asked what his favorite ice cream flavor is, he gives the in-hindsight completely predictable answer, “vanilla.” (Oliver’s is neopolitan).
Later on, we find that Joseph has a talent with creating games on the platform Scratch, the MIT-developed platform that has gained immense popularity among children and teachers alike. He hands off the computer seamlessly with his partner, quietly and calmly dragging blocks to make their sprite move and working toward a functioning game.
What-ifs
A big part of me wants to see where Kevin, Oliver, Joseph, and Cara go for not only the rest of the camp, but for the rest of their lives. I know it would be unlikely and idealistic, but I would like to see Kevin, the video-obsessed surgery aspirer, get some hit show like Grey’s Anatomy. I want to see Oliver creating some biomedical prosthetic in a way as innovative as his hanging paperclips, and I want to find that starry-eyed Cara has found a way to make her fantasy books into real-world magic.
And maybe that’s how teachers feel in general. You always hope that in some way, you’ve influenced the lives of the people around you. And maybe that’s not true. Maybe Kevin, Oliver, Joseph, and Cara will all end up unfulfilled traders on Wall Street. But maybe, just maybe, in the future, they will have found something perfect for them, and I hope that I will have helped them in some way get there.
*All names have been changed for privacy