On March 13, 2024, grad student, Katelyn Redinger organized an event in collaboration with the Poudre Library called IMAGINATES. IMAGINATES is a bilingual youth program (Spanish and English) through the Poudre Library District. The program reaches out to youth (13-17) who come from diverse families.
The event welcomed Fort Collins community youth to the CSU Department of Chemistry for an all day interactive learning experience. The students got to learn more about chemistry and STEM through a tour of the labs, lectures, and hands-on experiments all facilitated by Katelyn.
Katelyn took the time to further discuss how she got involved with IMAGINATES and the importance of these programs within the community.
Question: What is IMAGINATES and how did you get involved with the program?
Answer: IMAGINANTES is a bilingual youth program (Spanish and English) through the Poudre Library District that “specifically reaches out to migrant youth, ages 13-17” (from their webpage: https://www.poudrelibraries.org/outreach/imaginantes.php) . I am passionate about ensuring that language, racial/ethnic background and prior exposure to STEM are not barriers to students’ engagement with scientists, research, and universities in general. This seemed like the perfect program to reach my targeted audience and form a connection between CSU and the greater Fort Collins community.
Q: Can you tell me about why you ended up pursuing your PhD in Chemistry at CSU?
A: I am from Montrose, a small town in southwest Colorado. I was excited to study closer to home after being out-of-state for five years (undergrad at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania and one year living in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico). I wasn’t planning on pursuing formal education past undergrad, but my undergraduate chem advisor suggested I consider graduate school. After a couple years off after undergrad, I decided I was ready to tackle a PhD… even though this was a career path no one in my family had taken… I’ll be the first in my family to earn a PhD in STEM. And one of only a few in my extended family to earn a PhD period
Q: What do you hope the teens took away from their visit to the Chemistry Department and what did you learn anything from the event?
A: I hope they left with an ability to imagine themselves as scientists, researchers, and active contributors to current research efforts. “Imaginantes” in Spanish refers to people that imagine. I wanted to create an opportunity for the students to explore labs, meet scientists, be on campus and imagine themselves being the scientist and doing the research themselves.
Q: How does this event benefit the Chemistry Department?
A: The library has valuable and unique access to the community that provides opportunity for us to engage folks of diverse age, economic and racial groups that we may not have been able to reach otherwise. It also provides space to create collaboration between graduate students and undergraduate students in the department. It is important that we connect with one another beyond the traditional TA-to-student interactions. Science communication is a powerful way to bring students, faculty, staff and the public together to learn from one another!
Q: Do you plan to turn this into a reoccurring event, and will this be connected to your environmental science workshop?
A: This is just the beginning of all of the collaborative events that we hope to host with the Poudre Library District. We hope to host this same event again in the fall, and I am brainstorming other collaboration ideas including possible science and art efforts, environmental science/climate change education, and citizen’s science opportunities. Hosting these events takes an immense amount of volunteer time. I could not have put this together without Albert Ochoa Castillo (Levinger Group), Cristian Vasquez Tapia Vera (Bandar Group), Juniper Morales (Sambur Group), and Maelle Gace (Chen Group)- graduate students who gave tours of their labs and helped facilitate event activities; and CSU chem department faculty and staff (Ben Reynolds, Carlos Olivo Delgado, Delphine Farmer, Hannah Gluckstern and Kathy Lucas). The CSU chem community really came together to make this happen. I hope to get even more people from the department interested in putting together future events.
