Our Mentors

I really enjoy watching the kids bring their inventions full circle from discovering a need/problem to developing a solution for it. I'm so impressed and inspired by their empathy; how they identified situations where they perceived other people, in many cases outside of their age/peer group, needed help with something, and they set out to come up with a sensitive solution for others. That gives me great hope that the future is indeed bright and promising! Time and time again, I'm seeing this strong sense of empathy manifested in the origin stories of the inventions and ventures led by these generations coming behind us.

It was so inspiring to me to watch the student inventors linking the dots and drawing conclusions on their own, without prompting. I particularly LOVED when the students organically started sharing their thoughts on each other's ideas and offered each other suggestions, from product development enhancements to commercial and pricing strategies-- It was really amazing to watch their interaction unfold and develop into a very rich peer-to-peer exchange of pretty brilliant and helpful ideas!

I enjoyed working with the students to see their project come to fruition and I also enjoyed being someone they can look up to for advice.

One of my students blew me away when he was demoing his product to me. He created a github and coded his piece, and for an 8th grader to have that type of skill level and have it all be self taught is truly remarkable.

I want to empower girls to pursue careers in STEM, and to see other women and people of color being successful.

My favorite aspect of the CSIC mentoring experience was learning from the students themselves. These kids have grown up with technology since before they could talk, so they're more natural users of it than we adults are! Hearing directly from them the problems they observe in their everyday lives, which are different from my own, was fascinating and inspiring.

As a way to “pay it forward” to those who’ve invested in me.

Seeing students understand and embrace the idea that the engineering process is a marathon, and not giving up because of hurdles they encounter.

To encourage the next generation of problem-solvers. It can be difficult, but extremely rewarding, to tackle a problem in a new way. I want to support those problem-solvers through the challenges they face, so that they can understand the entire process and not become discouraged in their journey.

Getting to see students’ inventions and hear about what they learned during their build process. There are many interesting stories about overcoming obstacles to make an idea into reality!