Surely you have heard of how many of our fellow peers are going into fields of STEM, an acronym for the four disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. This push for more science, technology, engineering and math is not surprising as we move toward more technology specialization and robotics. Who wouldn't want to work in companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, who are trying to work towards a "better future"?
New York City has been famously regarded as "the city that never sleeps" and is famous for its advertising and business/economics in Wall Street. But recently, it has been moving towards more of a STEM oriented direction. In 2015, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE), released a Strategic Technology Plan with three steps to integrate technology into instruction, invest in infrastructure and devices, and focus on the user. This plan has been led by Mayor Bill de Blasio of NYC and proposes an ambitious $81 Million plan. Mayor de Blasio announced that this plan will allocate private and public dollars to train old and new teachers, bring state-of-the-art equipment to classrooms and move the emphasis from word processing to coding.
Fast-forward to today, and Mayor de Blasio has kept his promise. More schools have pushed for programming classes and more students are graduating high school with a knowledge of a programming language and how to use it. Some nonprofits have been created as well, such as CityScience in New York. CityScience trains science teachers by connecting science education to urban environments. They create multiple science curriculums that submerge kids, teachers, and schools in learning at a local setting. Some of these organizations have also rebranded the STEM mantra to STEAM, making sure to include the arts as well.
Some schools in NYC aren't able to afford all the expensive equipment that STEM/STEAM requires and as a result aren't able to offer it to their students. But companies like MakerState and SteamKidsLab have offered solutions to these problems, by providing STEM and STEAM classes as after school programs to various schools.
NYC pushing towards STEM is a good thing for the city, as more engineering jobs are created in the process. More and more startups are beginning to grow in NYC, such as AirBnB, Huge, Kickstarter, MakerBot and more. If you feel left out from all this STEMing growth, companies like Flatiron School offer coding boot camp classes to everyone. They even have a FREE boot camp prep course to get you interested into STEM.
Of course, if working for companies like Google or Facebook doesn't interest you, you can go into a boring company and work as a drilling, petroleum or mining engineer. Don't forget, that's also STEAM.
Technology isn't going anywhere and STEAM isn't either. The line between the Arts and Science is slowly disappearing, and in the near future, we all have to be adept in multiple fields. How else are we going to stop the AI takeover?
