GEMS is in the midst of planning an Introduce a Girl to STEM event this year to inform young girls about STEM and all the opportunities they can have in that field. 

GEMS stands for Girls in Engineering, Math, and Science and it is a club for anyone who is interested in engineering, math, and science or just STEM in general. There are two teacher sponsors and six captains made up of juniors and seniors.

“[We] encourage and support girls to go into STEM fields, which historically have very few females in them,” co-sponsor Candace Jackson Fauth said.

This year the club will be hosting an Introduce a Girl to Stem day conference where the high school girls in the club will be running different activities related to the different areas of STEM for fifth to eighth grade girls. In doing this, they hope to spark interest in these young girls and encourage their interest in STEM. They haven’t set an exact date yet but they plan on having it sometime in February. 

“I feel like [ Introduce a Girl to STEM day] is a great opportunity for young girls to experience this amazing club,” club member Nora Duffy ‘26 said. “I wish I had done it when I was young so I knew about it before.”

The club meets every other Tuesday at south campus in room J103. The meetings start at 6:30 p.m. and last an hour. During the meetings, the girls do engineering or stem competitions or they will have guest speakers come to the school and share their experiences in stem. 

“The girls enjoy having speakers come to talk about their experiences,” Fauth said.

They are always doing fun and interactive activities at the meetings, Duffy said. Her favorite activity was when they created a car out of only a water bottle and a balloon. The other club members would race the cars against each other using air from their lungs and blowing into the balloon to get the car to move. 

“It made everyone think and it is just a fun and welcoming environment,” Duffy said.

GEMS gives girls insight into different job opportunities and fields of STEM they could go into in the future. By doing this it opens up different careers for the girls that they never thought they could participate in. 

“GEMS has definitely gotten me more interested in going into a field in science or math,” Duffy said. “I have also learned about hundreds of programs and jobs in the future that interest me and it gets me excited about the future.”