Promoting K-12 STEM Education With the Army’s Educational Outreach Program
School of Statistics Assistant Professor Jie Ding and a team of statistics graduate students are leading summer apprenticeships to promote K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. With support from the Army’s Educational Outreach Program (AEOP), Ding has created a High School Apprenticeship opportunity with the goal of exposing students to research performed by real, professional scientists and engineers at a state-of-the-art university facility.
In Ding’s apprenticeship, participants Avery Cheek, Anna Gye, Gunnar Kennedy, and Neha Reddy receive funding support while performing research relating to the project, “A Journey of AI Research: Understanding and Exploring Supervised Learning.” They are mentored along the way by School of Statistics graduate students Jiaying Zhou, Ganghua Wang, and Jiawei Zhang, who guide their technical and professional development.
In addition to providing graduate students with important mentoring experiences, the program provides an obvious benefit: Apprenticeships reveal what scientific exploration looks like in a university research setting, where students can make discoveries that benefit the greater good. The project runs from April to August.
