The first STEM Boomerang, the NM Educated Workforce in STEM Symposium, in Dec 2017 was the first of it’s kind.  MWW thought it up because it was clear that most people had no idea of the amazing young people that had come from all over New Mexico, gone to school here, and succeeded so well that they had moved to Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, UCSD, U Washington, and elsewhere to get advanced education.  Some had moved to the Bay area or Boston for post doctoral experience and found great opportunities there in startups, biotech, and pharmaceutical firms.  Some are professors at Johns Hopkins, U Florida, and U Wisconsin.

Why are New Mexico students special?  I think that the opportunity to hike, see the stars at night, and learn in an environment where nature is so close to us is a generally unrecognized benefit of growing up here.  New Mexico students are like other young people around the world, but there may be some opportunities for them to discover themselves and their surroundings that don’t exist in other parts of the world.  Let me explain…

What happened in education? About 15 years ago, I (MWW) realized that the students in my Genomics/Molecular Biology class weren’t using their imaginations to learn. In 15 minutes, by asking them to imagine the inside of a cell or put things they had learned together in a new way, they would enter an almost catatonic state – yet on the outside, they seemed perfectly normal.

I spent a year trying to figure out what had happened.  I talked to AP science teachers, other high school and college teachers, law professors, very high level people at our Federal Agencies.  They all had the same responses. 1. The kids are lazy. 2. The parents aren’t doing their jobs. And 3., fire the teachers.  That didn’t seem right.  If the solutions were right in front of us, why hadn’t we solved the problem?

Creativity and play are key. I found some papers about children 0-5 who weren’t allowed to pretend play.  They lost analytical and symbolic reasoning and empathy.  That is math, writing, and the ability to engage socially.  I realized, thinking of my own children’s experience, that No Child Left Behind had lead to too much of a reward for memorization and little for creativity.  We also thought that we needed to keep boys busy, so we put them in organized sports. We were afraid of their being abducted, so we didn’t let them roam.  TV, video games, etc. It became clear to me that we all had allowed the 24/7 educational environment to become overly passive for our young people.  The culture didn’t ask them or inspire them or look for their creativity.

The answer was to make the path to creativity familiar. For me, as a teacher, it was as if my students, who were juniors and seniors in Biology had a room in their brains (their imaginations) that they didn’t know how to access, didn’t know if they were any good at it, and didn’t know what the rewards would be of accessing it.  Honestly, that year was one of the most fascinating of my teaching career because I was discovering in the classroom and helping students develop a tool that was profound and unknown to them. We started every class by turning out the lights, closing our eyes, and visualizing what we were going to talk about that day.  We might go into a cell.  I’d ask, how big should we be?  How thick is the plasmalemma? Let’s go over to a mitochondria and see if we can ask any great questions about it?  Typically, we would end up asking amazing questions – that hadn’t been asked before, that could have contributed to our understanding of disease, development of technology, and communicating science.

At first many students were irritated by this approach.  I remember a young man who was headed for medical school, as I asked him to look at a very simple table he hadn’t seen before and tell me what he saw.  I wanted to get the students to trust themselves and their ability to learn logically. The young man gave me some answers that were related to words he’d heard in early classes, but not close to relevant to what he was looking at. I asked him again to tell me what he saw. He started shaking and crying and said, “Just tell me what you want me to see.”  I remember that moment clearly.  I said, well, there are 2 columns, one is longer than the other, this number is larger than that one…

It got better. We worked hard together that semester and so many of the students grew in their ability to use what was inside them to ask and answer questions.  As that happened they became much happier in school and even in their lives.  I realized that as long as they thought all the answers were in a Google search they didn’t realize the profound beauty of being human and having magic inside of them.

Creativity changed lives. About 5 years after the class, I contacted the young man again and asked him if he thought our class was valuable to him.  He had finished medical school and was happy to let me know that genomics was very helpful because it’s the future of medicine. Then he said, “you know – this is maybe silly – but remember how we used to go down into a cell in our minds?  I use that all the time – it’s the way I understand immunology and antibiotic action and other things.  I was one of the best people in my class in this!”

Having put this kind of intentional energy into our students and seen their transformations, I believe fundamentally that they are important – vital – for the future of our state.  NM is beautiful and fragile and amazing. What I love about our former students is that they see this.  For them, it’s not “NM doesn’t want to change” – it’s “How can we grow and still keep our traditions, our unique cultures, our languages – and use all of it for innovation.”  Instead of seeing the diversity and individuality of our state as a negative, they see it as fueling creativity by giving us different perspectives and the ability to think completely outside the box.

In 2017, MWW was at LAVU for a reception. There I heard that business people thought we didn’t have a high tech workforce.  I knew that wasn’t true – it was just that they didn’t know them or know how to contact them.  I didn’t want to brag, but I knew I was key to connecting these dots!  I had a database of all the students I had worked with in our training program and had kept in touch with them.  This became the foundation of the STEM Boomerang on the participant side.  The rest is history.