Young Activists are Using STEM to Overcome Barriers to Social Change

Young changemakers are redefining what it means to ignite social change by utilizing a crucial element: STEM. By incorporating modern technology, engineering skills, and scientific knowledge, young women are creating innovative solutions that defy geographical barriers and make a widespread impact.

STEM allows solutions to our most pressing issues to be created from anywhere, but it also allows anyone to create them. From a 13-year old passionate about ending cyberbullying, to a teen in North Macedonia wanting to reduce environmental pollution, STEM makes it possible to turn anyone’s ideas for change into reality.

Using Technology as a Solution…to Its Own Major Problem

Trisha Prabhu is a 23-year old social entrepreneur and the founder of ReThink. ReThink is an innovative technology that aims to prevent cyberbullying before it happens. “People are really keen to re-envision our digital world,” Prabhu shared with Built By Girls. If ReThink detects language that could be harmful or offensive, it prompts the writer to rethink their words before publicly posting them.

“When we’re looking at a phone instead of someone’s face…it's really easy to say or do something we’ll regret,” Prabhu explains. “93% of the time, youth 13-18 [who] get that time to pause and rethink [will] change their mind.”

Prabhu started ReThink when she was only 13, after reading the story of Rebecca Sedwick, a 12-year old girl who died by suicide after being bullied online and in-person by peers. As someone who experienced cyberharassment herself, the issue hit close to home for Prabhu. “It was a silent pandemic that was affecting so many youth,” Prabhu recalls. “Redesigning the internet to put the interests of youth, to put the interests of safety at its center [is what ReThink is all about].”

She added that at the time, the main solution to cyberbullying was for the victim to report it, an ineffective solution for many victims who feared further harassment or shame as a result. Rather than put the weight on victims to combat cyberbullying, Prabhu designed ReThink to shift that responsibility onto the perpetrators. “Why don’t we instead get the cyberbully to stop and rethink?” Prabhu asserts.

For Prabhu, STEM has been a one-of-a-kind tool to make change. “As a woman of color in this space, I’m a huge advocate for more women of color paving the way for STEM social good initiatives,” Prabhu expresses.

As Prabhu emphasizes, women of color and other marginalized groups are uniquely positioned to influence change because of personal experiences with societal issues. STEM is a unique avenue to uplift these voices most impacted by current issues and allow their ideas for change to lead the way.

Technology Allows Anyone from Anywhere to Make Change

Not everyone has access to high-end technology, but with determination and a passion for social good, STEM allows anyone to make an impact. Angela Busheska is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science double major at Lafayette College, originally from North Macedonia, and the founder of EnRoute.

EnRoute is a sustainable fashion and transportation app that helps users make better choices for the planet in their daily lives. “In 2019, I had an aunt who was living in the city. She passed away due to the toxic air pollution,” Busheska shares. “I started to really look at, where is the pollution coming from? It was obviously [fossil fuels], but it was also coming from fast fashion and it was coming from transport.”

Initially, Busheska was focused on educating the public about sustainability and bringing awareness to how individual choices could make a difference. However, when COVID hit, she had to pivot her efforts to an online solution.

“I was…binge watching like eight hour videos [on YouTube]...just learning the principles [of coding],” Busheska reflects. “I was always into math so [coding] was a way for me to translate the math into something that I [could use] to create tools for humanity.” From these experiences, the first version of EnRoute was born.

Busheska first got interested in STEM in middle school. “[In] seventh grade, I enrolled in [the] Math Olympiad [and] failed badly,” Busheska recalls. “However, I really fell in love with the process.” Busheska continued being involved with Math Olympiad competitions all the way through junior year, when she finally made it to the national competition.

Busheska hasn’t always been good at math and STEM, but she loved it, so she kept working at it to get better. In order to succeed, Busheska says she’s had to embrace failure to overcome obstacles. She had been working for six years at improving her math skills before she was able to make it to the national level in her junior year. “I always say you can look at it two ways: you can see [that I was] a total failure those past six years or how those six years were stepping stones so that junior year could happen,” she expresses.

As someone who came from an underdeveloped region to the U.S. for school, Busheska knows better than anyone how educational inequities can be a barrier. “Our curriculum [in Macedonia] is nowhere near as developed as what people in the U.S. in high school have studied,” she explains. “Be considerate of all those differences [and] that everyone came from a different place.”

Along with curriculum gaps, Busheska has also had to overcome gender inequities in STEM. “My classes are like 90% men and 10% women, especially those in electrical engineering or those higher [level] courses,” she shares. However, she has hope for the future, seeing how there has been an increase in women over the past few years. “The number of women in STEM is growing so that’s been a huge plus.”

Everyone doesn’t inherently have the same resources, but with STEM, Busheska emphasizes that more people can pursue their passions and make an impact with their creations. “Nothing can grow as fast as STEM and technology can,” she expresses. “It’s really an opportunity for everyone to have a chance [to make change] and not for just a couple of lucky people who were born into STEM families.”

Spreading Public Health Awareness Through STEM Education

When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, people across the world struggled not only with the mental and physical challenges of the pandemic, but also with uncertainty and confusion fueled by increased misinformation. This phenomenon inspired then 16-year old Stephanie Wang to write a textbook, Epidemiology Unmasked, and start advocating for better public health education.

“There’s a lot of ignorance surrounding how diseases work [and] how the spread works,” Wang explains. “A lot of that is due to improper public health education or lack of emphasis on public health education.”

In response to overwhelming misinformation during COVID, Wang wrote and designed a public health textbook to be easily readable and comprehensible for people of all ages and knowledge levels, with the goal of improving public health awareness. “This was supposed to be a super easy-to-read, very visually-friendly, and very low learning curve, so that anyone who was interested in learning more about epidemiology could read it,” Wang describes.

Her textbook received overwhelming support. “Teachers started reaching out wanting to incorporate the textbook into their classes,” Wang recalls. “Eventually, I got the opportunity to teach a public health class through an online platform using my textbook.”

Through these experiences with her textbook, Wang realized the interest there was in learning about public health and how much potential there was for a wider public health education initiative. “That was how Project Unmasked was created,” she shares. Project Unmasked was a widespread campaign focused on advocating for better health education and increasing knowledge about public health crises through educational resources.

Now a sophomore at Harvard studying molecular biology, Wang is currently working to adapt Project Unmasked into a more generalized public health education campaign relevant beyond COVID. Professionally, Wang is planning to pursue a career path in healthcare and public health advocacy, now knowing the impact it can have on health equity.

“My future career goal is to be a doctor and see patients every day but also work in the legislative and activism fields to promote more equitable outcomes for patients,” Wang asserts. “Promoting health information accessibility [and] promoting public health literacy, these are going to be things that I keep in mind in my work as a physician.”

Motivating Change Through Modern STEM Creations

Alexis Williams is a young coder, designer, and changemaker. She is the founder of Police Brutality Resources, also known as PBR, a website she created in 2020 as a one-stop page for people to get engaged with advocacy. “I found myself spending so much time watching the news and scrolling through social media apps trying to find as many resources as I could,” Williams tells Built By Girls. “I gathered as many articles, petitions, bail funds, movies, books, etc. that I could find at the time…[and] coded a website with all that I found.”

After creating her website, Williams shared a TikTok video about it that went viral, which helped increase her website’s visibility. Though Williams started PBR during the 2020 uprising after George Floyd’s death, the website continues to be a resource for people to learn how to participate in social justice advocacy. ”These days, I’m pivoting the platform to be an all-encompassing tool for social justice…the goal is to make it super easy for people to get involved in our country’s most pressing issues,” Williams explains.

In addition to using technology as a tool to directly motivate people to get involved with activism, Williams founded Softwear By Lex, a fashion line that combines clothing and recycled technology. What started as a thesis project for school has turned into a way to repurpose technology and challenge stereotypes through a public brand. “I crumbled a little bit under the pressure to look and act a certain way in order to be taken seriously as an engineer. After my freshman year of school I realized just how important it is to be true to myself,” Williams shares. In this way, Softwear by Lex is a representation of Williams’ challenges and journey overcoming them in STEM spaces.

“All of [my] pieces nod to some of the struggles I faced as a woman in STEM, like a blazer that flashes the word “HUSH” when the surrounding volume gets too loud, directly speaking to all the times I didn’t feel heard… in some engineering spaces,” Williams describes.

Like many women in STEM, Williams has struggled with imposter syndrome throughout her journey in tech and engineering. “At times it’s much harder to think that I actually deserve what I have achieved, that I’m actually as smart as I say and think I am,” Williams expresses. To overcome this challenge that is all too common for women and girls in STEM, Williams reminds herself of how hard she’s worked to get to where she’s at.

One of her most memorable moments in STEM has been earning Best Senior Project from her New York University Engineering Program, for her work creating Softwear by Lex. For Williams, this is one core memory that reinforces her success. “Winning that award during my final year of college was really one of the first times in my life where I took a step back and was like, ‘Wow. You really did that,'” Williams reflects. “It meant so much to me that after four really difficult years as a minority woman in STEM academics, my work was being recognized by the school at such a distinguished level.”

From uplifting advocacy resources to igniting conversations about sustainability, Williams’ work is a testament to how STEM can directly be used to motivate change. “STEM is fundamentally about problem solving and the social injustices cropping up all over our world [are some] of our greatest problems,” Williams emphasizes. “If you break these problems that fuel injustice down into actionable tasks that can be solved with tools, the connection between STEM and social justice just comes naturally.”

Advice to Aspiring Young Changemakers

Among Prabhu, Busheska, Wang, and Williams, one thing is clear: with the right passion and ambition, STEM is an avenue anyone can take to make social change. While there are undoubtedly challenges like imposter syndrome and stereotypes to be overcome, you’re not alone as a woman in STEM (even if it may feel like it at times).

These women have been there. Wang remembers feeling like an outsider in early science and math classes as the only girl in the room. “It can be disheartening…,” Wang states. Having been in this position that so many girls in STEM can relate to, Wang makes it a priority to support incoming women leaders in STEM. “It is our duty as women to uplift other promising women in STEM,” she emphasizes.

Busheska can relate to feeling like an outsider in STEM spaces. Being a gender minority, while also having to overcome curriculum gaps in a new country, Busheska had to work hard to keep improving her skills. STEM isn’t something that comes naturally for everyone, but if you’re passionate about it and work hard to keep growing, you have just as much potential. For Busheska, embracing failure made her resilient. “I learned this the hard way, but failure should be celebrated and as long as you’re learning something from the failure, just go ahead [and] try,” she advises. “If nobody was there who looked like you, you have the great chance to be the first.”

Because women in STEM are often one of few or the only in STEM classrooms or workspaces, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed when trying to use it to make social change. To combat this, Williams recommends starting small - after all, local change is one of the most effective ways to make an impact. “Look around your community, what are the issues that you see? Identify one definable problem and start listing possible ways you can use your skills to help solve it,” Williams shares. “When you focus on a solution to a very specific and well-defined issue, you’ll come to find your ideas will scale to communities all over.”

As someone who started using STEM for social change at only 13, she knows what it feels like to not be taken seriously. If you struggle with feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders, especially as a woman in STEM, Prabhu suggests taking a step back and breathing. “I think there is a pressure on women to be perfect. Step out of that expectation of perfection,” she asserts. “Know that I believe in you and I just can’t wait to see what you create.”

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Hailey Dickinson (she/her) is a freelance writer for Built By Girls and has been writing for the publication since January 2023. She is a creator passionate about using digital platforms to build community, make connections, and ignite positive social change. Outside of writing for Built By Girls, she manages social media and communications for multiple non-profit organizations. She is a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota and has a Bachelor’s degree in communications.