Today’s guest blogger is Eilat Glikman. Eilat
is an assistant professor of physics at Middlebury College in Vermont. She studies dust reddened quasars and their
role in quasar/galaxy co-evolution, as well as faint quasars at high redshifts.
Eilat has two young children ages 8 and 5 and is dedicated to finding that
elusive formula for work/life balance.
When I was a postdoc at Yale, I participated in a program
intended to expose middle school girls to science via a hands-on approach that
made science accessible and fun. The
program, Girls’ Science Investigations
(GSI), brought middle-school girls to
Yale four Saturdays a year to explore topics in science. Some girls came because they were into
science and wanted to get more of it, others came with school groups, others
still were brought there by their parents as an enrichment activity. So, while most of the girls were already
science fans, there were many girls that were reluctant about the whole
thing. When I volunteered, I especially
enjoyed speaking with the reluctant girls.
I wanted to find out why they weren’t interested in the activity. What was it about science that turned them
off?
