How the Next Generation of STEM Scholars Will Build Our Future

In 2018, we at GE Foundation first teamed up with the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to launch a scholarship program aimed at helping Boston-area students pursue higher education in STEM. These students will be part of the next generation of pioneers and visionaries who will help find solutions to the world’s biggest problems. Now in 2020, the final year of the program, as we all face a global pandemic that has changed the way we live our lives, the need to nurture these future STEM leaders is clearer than ever. 

We recently gathered virtually to celebrate this year’s group of JFK-GE STEM Scholarship recipients. It was deeply encouraging and hopeful to see a virtual room full of 41 young faces primed to make a real impact on our world. 

Over the course of this three-year scholarship program, 116 students from the Boston area have earned JFK-GE STEM scholarships thanks to their academic accomplishments, leadership, integrity, drive and citizenship.  

As we know, all fields and organizations work better when a diversity of voices is represented. I’m proud to share that 90 percent of scholarship recipients came from diverse backgrounds, and more than 70 percent are female. As these students pursue STEM education and STEM careers, they will enrich our world and drive new innovation and accomplishments. 

In their scholarship applications, each student was asked why they plan to pursue a degree in STEM, and their answers were nothing short of inspirational. One student articulated just the kind of drive and passion that is so critical to using STEM to solve big problems that exist in the world today. His essay read:

Despite daily cutting-edge advances in STEM, people have been left behind, out of reach of medications they desperately need. This, in turn, fostered my passion to innovate medicine and reshape healthcare. In addition to STEM, I am pursuing an education that will expose me to all sides of this multifaceted issue: from the laws regulating medicine to the businesses placing them on their shelves. My goal is to restructure medicine so that it, without any exceptions, is accessible to all under-resourced communities. No one should ever experience the bottomless dread that accompanies being unable to afford the next asthma inhaler or EpiPen. I intend to put that in the past. 

This student, Gianfranco, hails from New Mission High School in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and he is headed to MIT to study biological engineering. Gianfranco’s words speak to the drive and determination that we see in this next generation to really make a difference.

At GE Foundation, I’m privileged to work with GE employees and partner non-profit organizations to help enable students like Gianfranco to pursue his lofty aspirations. Together we are working to help build a diverse pipeline of students ready to contribute to the workforce of the future.  Beyond programs like the JFK-GE Foundation Scholarship, we have invested to support STEM education in Boston Public Schools. This has enabled hands-on learning experiences for our students that can help prepare them for cutting edge careers in STEM. 

To further support STEM careers, this year we teamed up with Governor Charlie Baker to expand advanced manufacturing job training for Massachusetts’s North Shore. Our $2.5 million grant will support a training program for North Shore students as well as underemployed, unemployed and underrepresented adults, such as veterans, minorities and women. This program will help narrow the manufacturing skills gap in Massachusetts, fill workforce needs and create job opportunities in STEM.

While the term “STEM” may not have been in existence during President Kennedy’s administration, I am confident that he would be a passionate advocate for STEM education today. In his daring speech at Rice University in 1962, JFK issued a challenge to the American people: Send a man to the moon before the decade is through. The goal of his speech was a moonshot, but it accomplished so much more. President Kennedy called on the nation to invent bold solutions to our country’s challenges, and he ignited a passion for the sciences and technology in millions of Americans.  

I hope our JFK-GE STEM scholars will remember President Kennedy’s call for bold solutions as they begin their journeys in STEM. I am confident this group of young people will all achieve their own moonshot. 

Please see highlights from our virtual celebration below, including a Q&A with two of my colleagues, GE Research engineers Emily Cheng and Sara Peterson who discuss their STEM studies and how it has impacted their careers thus far.