Work Overload! - November 2020
From participating in an Online Physics Brawl to consulting for 501cTHREE, this month was very hectic for me :(
Hey there! 👋
I hope you’ve enjoyed your (American) Thanksgiving! How did you spend your break during a pandemic? Tell me about it here — I’d love to hear from you!
I’m Byeongjun, a junior high school student trying to create a social impact through working on various projects!
Here’s a TL;DR for those in a Rush:
🧑🏻🔬 Competing at an Online Physics Brawl
🧠 The Big Data Challenge
🌆 Consulting for a Climate Technology nonprofit — 501cTHREE
🧑🏻🔬 Competing at an Online Physics Brawl
Alongside my peers Caitlyn, Tam An, Megan, and Sahi, I participated in the Online Physics Brawl hosted by Fyziklani. The questions ranged anywhere from the basics of Kinematics to Quantum Physics (which I haven’t covered yet), and they were indeed challenging!
One thing I enjoyed about the Fyziklani challenge is this: teamwork. The virtual competition format allowed our team to split up into groups of 2-3 and solve individual questions after discussing the prompt and the solution. This format secured a higher rate of correct answers and helped me understand the context of the problem thoroughly for me to actively participate in the discussions.
In the end, we’ve placed 108th out of ~250 teams. As we didn’t expect ourselves to win when we first signed up, we were delighted with the experience by itself. This competition made me understand where I am compared to students worldwide and helped me identify the concepts that I am lacking and how I can go ahead to nail those concepts.
If anyone is thinking of participating in an online Physics competition, I would strongly recommend you to go for it, because the experience itself was valuable!
🧠 The Big Data Challenge
Since the first day of November, I’ve participated in the Big Data Challenge hosted by STEM Fellowship with my friends Louis, Josh, and Aron. Since then, we’ve met with education professionals from all across the world (and I really mean it) to discuss equity in education.
We first interviewed Tim Stephenson, a local science teacher based in Langley, Canada. He defines a good education system as “a system that allows students to explore beyond concepts that fall into the course” and where “teachers are able to explain why [the students] are learning what they are learning” - the current lack of education is derived from the ‘fixed’ education systems around the world that are generally not willing to evolve. Every other industry is expanding exponentially except education and they adapt better than education.
As interesting as this sounds, we’ve interviewed many others that had different opinions than him regarding equity in education. Some were very positive, while some have criticized the current education system. I’m planning on writing about this on my Medium blog, so stay tuned!
🌆 Consulting for a Climate Technology nonprofit
Over half a month, Ahmad, Ava, Adam and I were working on a TKS City Challenge where we consulted for a nonprofit named 501cTHREE - a nonprofit to find real solutions to climate change and embrace a low-carbon future through climate technology. In this challenge, we were asked to find a way to market their new water quality sensing solution in 1 out of 100 homes within a community.
The challenge is derived from Flint, Michigan and Newark, New York’s Water Crisis, where the general public is exposed to a high percentage of contaminated water with lead. Shakima Thomas is one of the residents in Newark’s west ward - her son is exposed to drinking water that had over 5 times the federal action level.
Our team has come up with a three-fold recommendation that includes measuring filtered water through a new and affordable WQMS (Water Quality Measuring System) as well as a volunteer coordination program. Once the challenge is over, I believe I’ll be able to share more insights on the progress we made.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter, feel free to share it with someone you know that might be interested in reading this 🙌