it's always great to be creative and look for an answer or an unconventional method to approach the problem that you're facing looking for gaps in your own field or what you know best and trying to understand if there's a way that this other field can fill that in kind of an interdisciplinary way I've always loved science fiction I've always loved space I love making music I love creating sound through different means and that has made bringing together two things that I'm doing and enjoy very m
uch together significantly easier making you know data and science fun and interesting to a younger group but also allowing them to be creative the Astro beats project it was a project idea I came up with because I saw in Nashville that there was such a large black community and it's so musically inclined but there wasn't a lot of opportunity for young girls in the middle school age from that Community to learn about astronomy and physics in both astronomy and physics the representation of peopl
e of color specifically black women is abysmal I think that was a word even used in a a survey it's abysmal and there are a lot of improvements that need to be made of course at you know the college The Graduate and even Beyond at those levels the least that we can do for the middle-aged girls is to make sure that they know the options available to them and that they believe that they can pursue anything that they want the whole point of this project was to build their science identities at that
very critical age but also give them the opportunity to learn about these topics where they otherwise might not have had the chance what I had them do is take astronomy and physics data and convert it into music 20 blue you look for the 20 and then you try to match the height of your bar and so I showed the girls how to use the data sonification software and I said make the song that you want to make I will be walking around to help you but this is all you this you create whatever piece you wan
t to create from your real data set for example um one girl had exoplanet data and so when an exoplanet transits in front of a star the brightness of that star periodically dips because the exoplanet's in front of it and so you could look in a plot you can look for that decrease in brightness but in a song you can listen for those notes begin to go down and come back up um so it's a completely different lens to analiz your data but it's also a lens that you created and I also went over what you
can do in the field what kind of careers this can lead to and I also showed them pictures of other women of color who have gone into the field so that they can see themselves that this is you know you can bring this to fruition for yourself I invited the girls and their families to the dire Observatory and I hired an ensemble to perform their pieces and so they had a chance to come up on the stage and talk about what they had learned what their music meant to them and then The Ensemble performed
their piece [Music] after the girls look so proud when they all got up on stage to take their pictures and we I gave them certificates for completing the Astro beads project and all of their confidence was so much higher than when they initially started they all believed that they could be scientists so it was it was really great now that I have gone through the bridge program I've spent time at Fisk and at Vanderbilt I know that I can find exactly what I need to carry out any of the ideas any
of the aspirations that I have and that it's not a perspective that I had prior to coming to Vanderbilt some of the things out in space sound absolutely insane I can't believe they've been real I never imagined that it was something that you could turn into a career it was just something that I thought was so different and novel to the things that we do every day and the fact that I get to study those things and teach other people about you know all these things that are so much bigger than we a
re it's just such a neat field to be in we need as many projects as we can to make sure that the groups that are under represented in science can have that exposure can have the resource and can have the opportunity I just hope that I see them in a science field in the future or maybe even business but they knew that they had the opportunity to pursue stem if they wanted to
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