STEM Circles Sessions 1 & 2 Recap

YSI's latest initiative capped off two great inaugural sessions this past week

INDIA & GREECE—Over the past week, we had our first two sessions of our latest initiative, STEM Circles. These insightful webinars were hosted by Jiya Gupta and Zoe Triantafyllidou on April 26 and April 30, respectively.

Session 1 - Tips on Applying to University with Jiya Gupta | Saturday, April 26

Jiya, YSI Researcher and Chapter Leader for India, hosted the first ever STEM Circles session on April 26. During this webinar, she discussed her experience applying to universities, important things to consider in writing application essays, advice on what to do/avoid throughout the process, and how she got accepted to five of the best universities in the UK—the University of Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Jiya explains how she built a profile that maximized her chances of getting accepted—without being a straight A student—and the lessons she learned along the way.

Along with all this valuable advice, she provides guidance on how to shortlist universities and offers some useful research tools that can come in handy during uni application season.

All worth listening to! Particularly if you’re a high school student working on university applications to prepare for the next step of your educational journey :)

Check out the full slideshow from Jiya’s session here.

Session 2 - A Gene-Braindate! with Zoe Triantafyllidou | Wednesday, April 30

In the second session of STEM Circles, Zoe, YSI Researcher and Chapter Leader for Greece, talked about presenting about genetic engineering and innovations in synbio, how they connect to the agriculture and food production markets, the ethics of gene editing in the modern world, and discussing a really cool agriculture project she’s working on in a team of aspiring scientists. The session entailed watching some intriguing videos about gene-editing, DNA sequence formation and protein structure formation via a website called Alphafold and the presentation of a significant company in the sector called Ginkgo Bioworks.

To begin the session, Zoe introduced the fundamental concepts of gene-editing, the world hunger and food production sector as well as the correlation between them all, emphasizing the importance of achieving zero hunger as the second goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by implementing agricultural techniques/mechanisms using such scientific approaches.

Zoe then discussed the potential of using gene-editing in agriculture to cultivate seeds with more nutritious substances in soil, and how AI can be used as an identification app/detector of the soil’s properties to add the corresponding compounds that the plants need. She talked about the implications of such nutrient-enhancing techniques, especially in a world so obsessed with making food more nutritious and savoury—although the two often don’t correlate.

The session concluded with a discussion with the attendees on the morality/ethics of gene-editing both for humans and other organisms—particularly in the agricultural sector. You can watch this in the video above!

For more content from Zoe’s session, check out this folder of videos.

Interested in running a webinar or workshop for Youth STEM Initiative?
Traditionally, we’ve hosted events with people from outside the organization. But we now want to more deeply embrace the uniqueness of the people of Youth STEM Initiative—your varied perspectives and experiences—to give you the opportunity to share your knowledge and skills across diverse scientific topics.

This is the idea behind our STEM Circles initiative: a sharing circle where everyone can contribute and discuss fascinating research in STEM or share career-changing experiences, with one or multiple people orchestrating it.

Find out more about it here.

You can lead a session as long as you’re a current member of YSI, regardless of your position.

---

stay tuned for our upcoming post on something special by YSI Japan 👀