mySTEM Scholar Treesa Anil is a freshman with a strong passion for STEM. At just 14 years old, Treesa is pursuing a medical pathway, driven by her interest in working with people and finding solutions to problems within her community. She is committed to building unity, demonstrating leadership, and creating meaningful impact.
Treesa has officially completed her Action Plan through hard work, strong connections, and many hours of thoughtful planning. She successfully launched science events at local libraries, where she engaged younger students through movement-based activities, demonstrations, and hands-on experiments. Through these efforts, Treesa has inspired many to learn more about STEM and in the process, she has developed a stronger and more confident STEM identity herself.
Q1: Describe your motivation for joining mySTEM.
First, my eighth grade science teacher showed me the application just a couple days before the deadline. I just really like to try new things, and I wanted to have more extracurriculars, especially going into high school. I think that mySTEM is a really unique extracurricular compared to a lot of others.
I was really excited when I was picked to do it because I think it gives those opportunities to be a leader more than just studying or researching. You get to be a leader in STEM.
Q2: Describe your Action Plan in detail. How did you choose this particular topic in your
project?
My Action Plan was a STEM program in the library for kids, and it was basically where we’d have a themed event. One was a magnet event and another was a density event. There’d be a movement activity, a demonstration, and maybe some couple of hands-on activities. I think I chose that because I really like working with kids. They’re fun, they always surprise you.
There was a lot of communication that I had to do, especially with adults, which was a little nerve-wracking at first, but it got easier as I went. There was also just knowing exactly all the details of how each event was supposed to go. Each activity, all the supplies. There was just a lot of planning on how exactly we want to run it. For example, how we want the kids to engage with it. We could do it where they actually did the activity or we just demonstrate it or something like that.
Q3: In what ways has your mentor contributed to the development and successful completion
of your plan? What are some ways that you feel like mentors and other scholars were able to
help you succeed?
I used the grants that were provided by mySTEM, and that helped me get a ton of supplies because there’s a lot of supplies involved. I used volunteers from my friends, but also one of the volunteers was mySTEM scholar. Also, my mentor, Val, was really great at helping me. Including for the future like knowing how to expand because I think she has a lot of networks and just because she’s done a lot of this before.
Q4: What are your aspirations for the future of your project and what measurable impact have
you already observed as a result of your efforts?
For the future, since I’ve only been doing it in one library, I want to see if I could branch out into other libraries. Even if I have some time constraints, I could still, use the active events that I’ve already planned and implement them in other libraries. So I’m looking to just expand it maybe a little more over the state instead of just the West Jordan branch.
The measurable impact that I’ve been seeing is that there have been like 15 to 20 kids showing up per event. Whenever they are there, I ask them more questions towards the end to see if they’re actually learning something from it because they’re applying a lot of the stuff that I said to them before and answering the questions that way.
Q5: Do you believe that your participation in the mySTEM program has facilitated the
growth of your STEM identity?
Yeah. I definitely think it did because I kinda moved from just learning in the classroom to being able to apply the skills and teach it to other kids. So it helped me see that I’m representing science in the community. Also, it just helped me build a lot of the soft skills that I think are really important in workplaces.
