CuSTEMized Blog

Welcome to our blog for CuSTEMized! CuSTEMized is a not-for-profit initiative that provides personalized motivational books to encourage girls in STEM. Follow this blog for words from our founder and director, Jean Fan, as she shares her thoughts about women in STEM and provides updates on CuSTEMized.

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First and foremost, I want to thank everyone for their tremendous support on our recent Kickstarter campaign! We grew a lot as a team in putting together this campaign, met many wonderful scientists along the way, and even had a few articles written about us (wow!).

But unfortunately, because we have failed to reach our $10,000 goal, My Colorful Future will not be funded. As with failed Kickstarter campaigns, no backers will be charged for their pledges and we will not be fulfilling any pledge prizes.

As scientists, we are familiar with failure. Experiments fail. Grants get triaged. Papers get rejected. We understand that failure is always an option. But quitting is not! When faced with failure, we adjust parameters, we rewrite and reorganize, we improve, and we find alternate ways to succeed. What we lack in funding, we will make up for in brain power.

Moving forward

I still believe that it’s so important for kids, in particular girls and minorities, to have visible and relatable role models. At http://custemized.org/, we encourage kids to (literally!) see themselves in STEM by providing personalized storybooks that depict them in different STEM careers. But we also want kids to see that there really are people just like them currently in these STEM fields! Therefore, we are still working with current women and minority scientists in the field to teach kids about a wide range of scientific careers!

Moiya McTier is a planetary scientist working with us to teach kids about planetary science. Do you know what a planetary scientist does? Check out her page to find out!

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If you are or know of a scientist interested in being featured, please contact jean@custemized.org for more information on how you can get involved. Follow cuSTEMized on Facebook to learn more about different scientific careers and for updates on when these pages will be available for personalization to feature your child.




Helping teachers help their class

Friday June 10, 2016

Teachers strive to inspire and empower students with the confidence and skills to change the world. I recently had the pleasure of helping one amazing teacher, Melody Tsai, to do just that.

Melody initial contacted us, saying: I initially wanted to give these books to the 10 girls in my class for an end of the year gift before going to Kindergarten. Then, I wondered what could the 5 boys in my class get. Thankfully there is a drop down menu for the boys as well! I am ecstatic! Because I am a teacher, I do have difficulty printing in colored ink as I am in a low income level school in the middle of the desert where resources to get mass colored printing can be hours away.”

…well, we can fix that! I was more than happy to print these books and ship them out to her. Melody took the time to work with us to personalize books for her entire class!

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Each book was actually made by yours truly



Inform and Inspire

Thursday May 19, 2016

The CuSTEMized team has been working hard on a Kickstarter campaign for a new book and app. Please check it out! https://kck.st/1WB2bcN

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We continue to encourage kids in science by depicting them in cutting-edge science careers with our personalized storybooks. But we also want kids to learn how science can be used to solve real-world problems and show them some of the amazing women and minority scientists doing that science!

Together, we can change the face of science and inspire the next generation of scientists



I was having dinner with my friend Dan the other day, who mentioned what a big success cuSTEMized has been, as if we were some group of high-tech Silicon-valley CEOs working in those modern open space floor-plans. But I had to break it to him: we’re still just operating out of my apartment (at least it’s not my parent’s garage!). For our hardcover and softcover books, we partner with a professional manufacturer, but to keep spiral-bound books affordable, we still make them in-house…here:

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Each spiral-bound book is made by hand (by yours truly) with donated time and labor. Kamil took a picture of me after I came back from a weekend off to do a TEDxJHU talk and made a dozen books in one sitting (eesh I look tired!).

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It’s so important to offer affordable products. But until we reach the scale and volume where we can get the prices of each book down to where parents, particularly low-income graduate students such as myself, can afford to buy this non-essential item for their kids, we will just have to donate our time and labor to meet them half way.

That goes for our whole team of amazing volunteers! We’ll just have to do what we can until we can do better.

Best,
Jean

 




Science Club for Girls Graduation!

Saturday April 30, 2016

Thanks to your donations, cuSTEMized was able to collaborate with Science Club for Girls to bring free personalized books to the 1st grade class at the Amigo’s school! Congrats to the 1st grade class on another year well done! Hope they enjoy their cuSTEMized books and keep doing science! Check out more photos on our Facebook page!

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Thanks to the wonderful Science Club scientist mentors for collaborating with us and collecting the students’ information so we can personalize books for them! Special thanks to admins Terina-Jasmine Alladin and Lydia Peabody for helping coordinate and organize!

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And of course, thanks to all of you for your continuous support! Your donations and books orders support our Free Book Fund and outreach events. There are also lots of free ways to support cuSTEMized and our mission so please check them out!

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