Science Seminar Club is relatively new – its first meeting was held about two months ago. It was created by Smriti Kanangat, junior, with the intent of keeping interested students up-to-date with current research undertakings around the world.
It is modeled off the actual research world. “When you go into a science field… what ends up happening is if you start working in a lab, they have every week, typically, these little one hour seminar sessions where somebody will present the information that they’re either researching about, or they’ll present a paper that’s interesting that relates to the lab’s research,” said James Paige, science teacher and club sponsor.
He argues that it is a valuable supplement to classroom curriculum because science is changing every day. “We just kind of bounce ideas off each other in a little think tank to get everyone in the lab thinking about new ideas and things to try in the lab. That’s kind of the basis of this, not in the way of doing research, but just getting kids exposed to different areas of sciences, getting them thinking about it, so they can explore their interests,” Paige said.
This club is unique in that it is predominantly student-run. “Smriti wanted to leave it open-ended and let the students decide how they wanted to run it. If they wanted to give an article to everybody, everyone read it and we come back and we discuss it. If we Skype with professors from around the U.S., we talk about their research with them [and so on],” Paige said.
Science Seminar Club has had two informational meetings but plans to host its first actual seminar within the next week or so.
