STEAMid

Students and parents of low-income households lack the knowledge to benefit from academic resources that facilitate transition into high-tech, and high-growth career tracks. Educators of low-income students are overworked, and may not be aware of the wealth of academic resources that can help their mentees thrive up the academic ladder. Lastly, high-tech job providers lack the community ties to effectively market their opportunities to students from low-income households across every racial/ethnic background.

STEAMid is a social opportunity platform with an obsessive-compulsive focus on the needs of the student. Academic resources such as internships, scholarships, and fellowships are the lifeblood of a scholar. Yet, there are no modern tools or platforms that facilitate access and application to these academic resources. Akin to Netflix, STEAMid's algorithm recommends personalized academic resources to high school and college students based on location, field of study, declared interests, and comparative network analyses.

Fundamentally, STEAMid addresses a lack of access and know-how that plagues economically disadvantaged communities across the U.S. and lessens their chances of securing competitive academic resources. At least 60% of each graduating class has done one internship during college. However, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), minority college students are vastly underrepresented in paid internships, with Hispanic students being the least represented among paid interns. Due to economic barriers, underrepresented students also avoid unpaid internships, thereby limiting their ability to build a professional network, which ultimately lowers their chances of transitioning into highly paid and competitive jobs after college. Meanwhile, academic resources are widely available but are hidden through millions of static web pages. They are mostly disseminated through personal networks as opposed to centralized databases powered by artificial intelligence. STEAMid can leverage cutting-edge and novel open-source machine learning technology that is distributed at scale to solve this issue in the 21st century.

STEAMid is a free progressive web app powered by machine learning that automates internship, scholarship, and fellowship recommendations with tailored mentoring to boost success. At its core, our platform looks and behaves like a native app which helps increase access. Additionally, we've layered several functionalities that simplify discovery, automate deadline reminders and requests of letters of recommendation. 

To jump-start STEAMid’s recommendation engine, a new user creates a profile account that relies on current academic interests and location. That information allows us to start recommending every opportunity within 100 miles of a student's current location. We rely on an integrated machine learning platform that takes into account comparative network profile analyses to improve the recommendations. The more students use the platform the better the recommendations and rankings. That is achieved through interaction with our services that help us (1) map preferences across different users and (2) cross-recommend academic resources to improve access and boost discovery with minimal effort. Lastly, access to information is not enough to succeed. We also use past success data to help students improve their application material. 

STEAMid serves driven but historically disenfranchised and underserved students nationwide. These students are diverse in their racial-ethnic backgrounds but share a common core social class status: most come from low expenditure districts that lack the funds for academic wrap-around services to help them find and secure internships, scholarships, and fellowships. We see driven low-income and first-gen high school and college students.  

As we’re building STEAMid, we interview our target population to understand the main pain-point that keeps them from applying to competitive academic resources. Ultimately, we have heard two main issues: knowledge and know-how. 

First, applying to multiple scholarships can be time-consuming, and oftentimes, many awards on scholarships.com are scams that are simply collecting emails for marketing purposes. A simple google search using the word “scholarship” returns 440+ million web pages, which is an insurmountable amount of information that no single human being can properly sift through. STEAMid solves access by automating the curation process by identifying competitive awards that are worth applying to. 

Second, we have heard from our community that knowledge and access are not enough. They need help putting their best foot forward to earn these awards. Early on in our life cycle, we will match students that require help with mentorship nonprofit networks to help them apply. As we grow our database of users and applicants on the platform, we will gather application data and deploy deep learning and neural networks scoring to help identify winning submissions. Only then, will we be able to help millions of students at scale. We anticipate that we will need access to 15K+ scholarship materials to train our automated application grading system. That system will help students improve their applications. 

We anticipate that STEAMid will become the most comprehensive database of academic resources (internships, scholarships, fellowships, and more) across the web. We will employ machine learning to help match students to great academic resources and employ deep learning and neural networks to help them successfully apply for these resources. 

Imagine a world, where every student receives top-shelf recommendations to advance their academic career through higher ed while being informed, and less burdened by college debt. In that world, the poor will have access to the kinds of academic resources Ivy League students enjoy. It is a shame that such a world does not already exist.

Today, if you are among the lucky few that secured at least one internship, one is far more likely to be employed in the field they studied in college, and the data indicates that this further increases the likelihood of pursuing a graduate degree in that discipline. Our work looks far into the future, as every year we succeed in increasing low-income students in the workforce through internships, scholarships, and fellowships, one generation increases its earning potential. And the research shows that higher earnings lead to stable individuals that start healthy families and contribute to society through long-term and sustainable means as these folks are likely to pass on their good fortunes. STEAMid has the potential to positively change the plight of students from low-income households today with a century of societal long-tail potential.   

Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies have been receiving negative press due to their propensity to exacerbate existing racial bias in our society. We see it with predictive policing datasets that encode systematic racism. The most common form of AI failure has been seen with image recognition software that fails to detect black faces reliably. AI technologies are permeating every aspect of our lives including our health care, education, research, purchasing habits, credits, and more. STEAMid’s effort is applying a technology that is failing the minority community to truly create an inclusive technology for the future prosperity of our country.  

We launched our MVP in October 2020. We have focused on a “selective distribution” strategy targeting our outreach across minority-centric communities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, more specifically in Boston and Cambridge, two magnet-cities that are the most productive hub of Biotechnology companies in the world. That approach has brought 9.1K+ individuals with 2.5K+ being monthly active users that have registered 233K event impressions on the app (clicks, scrolls, saving, and more). Interestingly, we have observed STEAMid usage across state lines due to grassroots word-of-mouth. Beyond Massachusetts, NY, CA, TX, VA, FL, and GA are the top states using STEAMid. 

Our key performance indicators are: (1) the number of internships (paid and unpaid) we help secure per unique individual, (2) dollar amount of scholarships and fellowships secured, and (3) mentorship matches to our nonprofit partners. We are currently polling our students to assess our impact and shortcomings. 

STEAMid will be the first centralized and comprehensive academic resource that uses machine learning to make access equitable while improving success. Our machine learning framework is baked into our effort from the ground up to enable discovery and relevant matching at scale. Currently, several open-source machine learning frameworks are being utilized across entertainment platforms and social media enterprises. Yet, none of these tools are being used to massively educate. We believe that STEAMid can repurpose these tools to bring about positive change. 

Lastly, our solution is inspired by our lived experiences, which give us a perspective like no other as we understand the difficulty our communities face to find and successfully apply to competitive academic awards. Simply put, this is a key aspect of our innovative bent. According to the demographer Rogelio Saenz, the United States is undergoing a significant demographic shift where minority race groups are growing at a fast clip and will eventually become the majority by 2050.        

Yet, if we keep under-educating the current minority population or keep offering old technology to solve entrenched societal issues, we will end up with a majority-minority population that is ill-equipped to tackle the future of tech, healthcare, education, climate change, and more. STEAMid is working today to meet the demands of the 21st century. In short, STEAMid will educate and train the minority community in high-growth, well-paid, and forward-thinking fields in the Sciences, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics.

9.1K individuals have come through STEAMid with 2.5K recurrent users. STEAMid specifically aims to serve underrepresented individuals entering the highly competitive STEAM world. The word “underrepresented” covers women, LGBTQ, low-income, persons with disabilities, and racial-ethnic minorities. We serve high school, college, and graduate students that lack the know-how of securing competitive academic resources.

 We aim to onboard 25-100K students on the platform in the next year. According to Pew Research, a much larger share of undergraduates are in or near poverty, which includes a number of families from the lower-middle-income strata. In five years, we anticipate reaching 3-10 million students. With those kinds of numbers, we will have access to an adequate amount of data to improve our predictive power. By year 5, we will also have access to students' success rates over time to see reliable trends in our approach.

We measure a number of factors to assess our impact and progress. Top of the funnel, we monitor our traffic to assess STEAMid’s reach as well as our best distribution channel. Based on current data, STEAMid is mostly being used in urban areas from the states of Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, Texas, Florida, California, and Illinois. We track user behavior on the app to refine our recommendations. As a tech company that wants to scale the good we can do, such data is paramount to our success. 

Currently, we can track intent to apply but require secondary polling to assess application success. As the data comes in this summer, we want to know who is getting in, who is not, and why. To answer those questions, we will ask our users to submit their personal statements and resumes used to apply. Those datasets will give us a probing view that might explain why seemingly competent students fail to succeed at securing competitive academic resources. Initially, our review process will not scale. But ultimately, we will employ the recently released generative pre-trained transformer 3 (GPT-3) API to process natural language and assess why certain students are not getting in. 

While we have made significant progress in building and launching STEAMid, significant challenges lie ahead. Access to certain machine learning tools can be expensive as one scales but our initial assessment will help us decipher where we should expand our energy.    

1 full-time 

2 part-time

CEO

STEAMid was founded based on Roodolph’s lived experience as a student of color that struggled to get his first internship. Roo earned a bachelor's in Chemistry from UMASS Boston while working 32 hours/week in the kitchen of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Roo could not consider unpaid internships since he was a substantial financial contributor to his household. Countless low-income students across the country face the same obstacle yet we have no tools dedicated to solving this disparity. Roo is currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard defending his Ph.D. at the end of June. 

Roo has put a team together that is skilled to solve this inequity. The team is composed of:

Software developer

Emmanuel Sebastien Thomas is a data engineer at Lyft by way of Microsoft with a decade of experience in deploying machine learning at scale. Emmanuel is passionate about using big data technologies, in particular the Hadoop ecosystem, to enable process automation and loves to support open source projects for the betterment of society. 

Community/outreach coordinator 

Rose St Pierre has extensive experience in the healthcare field recruiting subjects for social research and direct patient care fronts. Rose is currently a registered nurse. Previously, Rose worked as a Research Assistant for the Mind Body Wellness in Supportive Housing (Mi-Wish) study at the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center. As a nursing student, Rose also observed a general lack of knowledge around the academic resources that exist to help students enter and succeed in nursing. 

Fundamentally, STEAMid is built to tackle diversity, equity, and inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. It is critical that the country and the world understand that STEAMid is not a post-facto justification to fit the time, but a startup born to solve the inequities of this time. 

Early this year, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Life Science Center (MLSC), we hosted a free workshop to help Boston Public School students apply and secure competitive scholarships. While our geographical target was well defined, countless students from public high schools and universities all across the country joined in. This is the power of the decentralized nature of technology today. With great technology comes far-reaching responsibilities.

STEAMid’s leadership is composed of folks that experienced the ramification of the disparities in STEAM education. We will grow our team with that principle front and center. We have also surrounded the core executive team with social advisors that represent every constituent we seek to solve the problem for. While we have benefited from the very resources we are putting out in the world, we want to make certain we improve our offerings by listening to the voices of those we serve.

The entrepreneurial journey can be lonely and fraught with existential peril without the right guidance. As first-time founders, we are embarking on a new but exciting adventure. Our work has the potential to change the way millions of students access and secure academic resources and we want to give this endeavor the best fertilizer for sustained growth. 

We are applying to this Fellowship to seek a community of like-minded individuals for support and guidance as it is unequivocal that it represents the absolute best the world has to offer. We are here to listen and experiment with what we learn from the program. Given the opportunity, we will reinvest in the community by sharing our successes and failures to help budding entrepreneurs. 

As with any ventures that are worth their salt, we expect to encounter cultural barriers as well as recruiting difficulties due to the fact that great software engineers can command high compensation from the likes of Google. But we expect to learn how past Fellows have broken through these barriers to recruiting top talent in the face of steep competition. This Fellowship has mentored impressive individuals over the years and being among social impact entrepreneurs of this caliber will inspire us to reach greater heights.

Business model 

We know the theoretical construct of the business model we want, but we need access to the nitty-gritty details of implementing that model. STEAMid is a B-Corp SAAS enterprise that will bring value to its users through access and training on how to secure the most competitive awards out there. Such services are currently offered by Academic Boutique Consulting firms to the tune of $10K+ a year. Disrupting that market will require room to experiment and fail until we find product-market-fit.    

Public Relations
The founders come from a scientific and technical background. We do not want to assume that building a brand is easy. We will seek the advice of experts to learn. In the age of social media marketing, a company's reputation online can help generate or drain value. We’d rather be on the former end of that spectrum. 

Thus far, we have partnered with five Boston-based non-profits that offer guidance and mentoring to the students we serve. They are MassBioEd, Bottom Line, Science Club for Girls, and Massachusetts Life Science Center (MLSC), and Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP). In 2021/2022, we will expand that circle and actively partner with Public Universities, Scientific Societies, HBCUs, Native American Organizations, and entities that share our central premise: obsessive-compulsive focus on the needs of the student. Short of that, we will save the company’s energy to serve the underserved. 

The American Studies Association (ASA) is committed to “helping students know themselves, know their options, and make informed decisions to achieve their education and career goals.” Our solution perfectly fits the vision behind the ASA Prize for Equitable Education. Currently, there are no cutting-edge tech platforms that focus on making academic resources (Internships, scholarships & fellowships) more accessible to help underrepresented scholars enter and most importantly thrive in the STEAM disciplines. By leveraging artificial intelligence tools such as machine learning we can deliver our solution at scale. 

Following the COVID19 pandemic, the world will become increasingly digitized as evidenced by the rapid transition to various virtual platforms to stay connected with friends, family, and coworkers. Students may lose their interpersonal relationships with professors, who are usually the source of information about academic resources. STEAMid will become a reliable source for students all across America that were already underserved prior to the pandemic.

By 2025, we anticipate the ASA Prize will help STEAMid with the following:

1. Instituted in every high school and college in the U.S.A. and Canada.
2. Commonly used among educators and parents to encourage their students to find academic opportunities.
3. Adopted by the NSF, NIH, and CDC as their primary web-based platform to list their academic resources.
4. Adopted by university career services to educate their students on local and school-based internships. 
5. Used by ed-nonprofits that mentor underrepresented and disenfranchised students.

By 2030, HP Inc. is committed to help 150 million bridge the digital divide, and accelerate equity in a post-pandemic world that requires sustained efforts for decades to heal. HP cannot do it alone. The COVID19 pandemic revealed the digital divide that many in our community knew existed for a while. Now is the time to set up the infrastructure and support network that will help close that gap. STEAMid was born to make competitive STEAM academic resources accessible to underrepresented populations all across America. For STEAMid, access does not simply mean a flashy tool that displays opportunities but an intelligent tool that responds to the user and helps him, her, or them successfully attain their scholarly goals no matter how ambitious they are. 

With HP’s help and expertise, we stand a chance of making a true difference in the lives of millions of underrepresented populations all across the United States. By 2025, we anticipate the HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity will help STEAMid with the following:

1. Instituted in every high school and college in the U.S.A. and Canada.
2. Commonly used among educators and parents to encourage their students to find academic opportunities.
3. Adopted by the NSF, NIH, and CDC as their primary web-based platform to list their academic resources.
4. Adopted by university career services to educate their students on local and school-based internships. 
5. Used by ed-nonprofits that mentor underrepresented and disenfranchised students.

The Patrick J McGovern Foundation is committed to “tech-inspired global changemakers, optimists, and visionaries advancing AI and data solutions to create a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future for all.” At STEAMid we believe that early access to internships can expose underrepresented students to their field of interests, and make said student competitive for awards (ie. scholarship & fellowships) that can sustain interest and the drive to thrive in the STEAM disciplines. Consequently, having those resources on one platform helps students better navigate the academic path. Access alone will not be enough. 

STEAMid is deploying machine learning tools to help improve low-income students' chances of receiving these competitive awards. We cannot do it alone. By 2025, we anticipate the AI for Humanity Prize will help STEAMid with the following:

1. Instituted in every high school and college in the U.S.A. and Canada.
2. Commonly used among educators and parents to encourage their students to find academic opportunities.
3. Adopted by the NSF, NIH, and CDC as their primary web-based platform to list their academic resources.
4. Adopted by university career services to educate their students on local and school-based internships. 
5. Used by ed-nonprofits that mentor underrepresented and disenfranchised students.

STEAMid was built to solve entrenched generational problems that have persisted over centuries. Students of low-income households do not have the kind of network that can lend them competitive academic resources, especially when their environment may not even know of these wonderful opportunities. Solving such an issue requires a technology-powered approach that can scale and serve underrepresented populations all across the country. STEAMid will champion access to academic resources and utilize machine learning to increase one’s chance of winning these competitive awards.

We cannot do it alone. By 2025, we anticipate the GSR Prize will help STEAMid with the following:

1. Instituted in every high school and college in the U.S.A. and Canada.
2. Commonly used among educators and parents to encourage their students to find academic opportunities.
3. Adopted by the NSF, NIH, and CDC as their primary web-based platform to list their academic resources.
4. Adopted by university career services to educate their students on local and school-based internships. 
5. Used by ed-nonprofits that mentor underrepresented and disenfranchised students.