Stem Diversity Awareness Reflection Paper

Community Outreach Thought and Reflection

I read the Stem Diversity Awareness article as well as watched the Ted Talk where Jedidah Isler spoke about how students of color face racism as well as challenges that could impact their futures. I thought and agreed with everything Isler spoke about. I think it’s absolutely true that our society still excludes and distinguishes people of color. Isler mentioned how a man at their lunch table pushed all the dishes towards her and told her to basically make herself useful. It’s truly unfortunate that our society thinks things like this are appropriate and okay. I think Isler’s story can inspire many children, especially women or children of color who will experience discrimination, or be told

I think having places like this that are geared towards children who come from low-income and academically at risk schools is going to be very beneficial to their futures. They also provide an 8,000 dollar scholarship to be used towards college. This is a great idea. If we would fund programs like this in Portland, we would teach children of any income and academics that everything is possible and here is the help to achieve it. I think bias like this could affect us reaching out to the K-12 community. As we all know, children tend to tease other children, making them feel bad about them selves. As Isler mentioned, people are going to put you down, but you need to pick yourself back up and continue on, this should also be taught in the after school enrichment groups and even in classrooms in general. I think that by reaching out to the K-12 community, we could encourage and boost the confidence of kids who might need it. By instilling the fact that these children can do anything they set their mind to, we are setting these children up for success, just like Jedidah

As a nurse, we are advocates for everyone, despite their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and so on. Bias within a nursing role could be detrimental, and even job threatening. Unfortunately, there are nurses in this world who do show bias to people whether it’s obvious or not. As a CNA, I see bias towards our residents all the time. Other aides complain and refuse to help residents because they’re annoying or they ring their bell all the time, or because they cannot understand them when they talk. We have an aide who is Indian and likes to sing and talk in her native language and a certain aide would refuse to care for her because it was annoying that she would sing and talk in her native language and she couldn’t understand her. Things like this makes a patients experience terrible as well as if they find out, it can hurt their feelings, self esteem, and cause more problems for the aides who do want to work with this