On March 20th, over 60 students and teachers from Bay Area high schools visited the Lab for High School STEM Day, a monthly program hosted by Berkeley Lab’s K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Program in collaboration with the Women’s Support and Empowerment Council (WSEC). The program featured talks about science, technology, and engineering efforts Lab-wide, and included tours of the Engineering Division’s Fabrication and Composites Shops and the 88-Inch Cyclotron (part of the Nuclear Science Division), as well as the Advanced Light Source (ALS), the Integrative Genomics Building (IGB), and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

As part of the Engineering Division activities, participants engaged in a round of speed networking, in which they were paired with six technicians and engineers to speak about their career aspirations. Rebecca Carney, a member of the Electronics, Software, and Instrumentation Engineering Department who designs detectors for CMB-S4, organized the Engineering Division events in Buildings 77 and 77A. “It’s a privilege to work with Berkeley Lab’s K-12 office again to showcase the breadth of skills and careers in the Engineering Division,” said Carney, who was especially impressed with the students’ engagement. “Our volunteers were incredible, and in addition to tangible products and tools from their work, they brought bounds of enthusiasm to the event. This made a massive impact on the students to the extent that when we had to call for the groups to rotate, they begged for more time with our volunteers.”

At the 88-Inch Cyclotron, in a program hosted by the Nuclear Science Division (NSD), students met with science and engineering staff to learn more about the diversity of Berkeley Lab’s research goals and how they are achieved as part of the coordinated efforts of researchers and engineers from a variety of disciplines and expertise areas. Ken Lambert, an electronics engineering technologist who organized the activities at the Cyclotron, observed that “It was great to interact with so many students interested in science and engineering, and they were very interested in learning about the operations of the cyclotron and the various experiments that are taking place there.”

In Building 77, the students engaged in a round of speed networking, in which they were paired with technicians and engineers – including Andrew Lambert, Gabor Paulovits, Giorgio Vallone, Khoi Diep, Sean Spillane, and Tarun Prakash – to speak about their career aspirations.

The organizers also wish to thank staff volunteers Annemarie Del Bene, Dee Pickett, and Jeffrey Boyle for their contributions, which helped make this an impactful event for our visitors.