In Conversation with John Sutor and Carlos Mercado-Lara of SciTeens
Recently, Youth STEM Matters Volunteers Tashinga Mutemachani and Louise Robertson had the honour of interviewing John Sutor and Carlos Mercado-Lara, co-founders of the non-profit SciTeens. The COVID-19 pandemic meant we had to speak to them via Zoom, but that didn’t stop them from sharing some very valuable insights and advice! In the interview, John and Carlos shared what SciTeens is all about, their journey and achievements in establishing it and an insight into their future plans.
John Sutor and Carlos Mercado-Lara of SciTeens
Tashinga: Thank you both for joining us today! Let’s start with some introductions. John, what are your interests and essentially, what makes you who you are?
John: I am a rising junior at Florida State University, double majoring in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science. In terms of hobbies, I like hiking and road tripping. I also like vinyl collecting, which you can see from the albums I have on the wall (points at the wall). I love cooking as well, which I usually do on Sundays. That is basically me.
Tashinga: And you, Carlos?
Carlos: I’m Carlos and I’m from West Palm Beach, Florida. My parents are not from the US, they are from Honduras, which is in Central America. I am an MIT student studying Biological Engineering; I am also interested in hiking. John and I have gone to several states. I enjoy playing soccer, fitness and being outside- it is a huge part of who I am. Overall, I like giving back and being supportive given the fact that I receive a lot of help to be in the position I am in.
Tashinga: Wow! This wasn’t written in the question template, but you guys were friends in high school too right?
Carlos: Yes.
John: Yes, we have been friends since freshman year.
Tashinga: I’d be interested to know how did you both meet?
John: It was pretty interesting, we had a French class together at our high school. We were not like huge friends, we just sat together and talked a little bit. We bonded in sophomore year when we had a shared physics class, so we studied for the class together and that is how we truly bonded. It was great!
Carlos: He would crack jokes in class, I would laugh and then get in trouble (everyone laughs). It was pretty funny.
Tashinga: Very interesting, I guess John was quite the trouble maker! Moving on to the next question: How did your love for Science start? When was the moment you realised you had this passion and that it was something you wanted to take on?
Carlos: In my case, it happened in elementary school when I was around ten years old. One of my science professors had a club in our class where we would take care of fish and animals and do cool things like putting mentos in coke bottles, which you are probably familiar with. We also built rockets and it was super cool. That was the only time I got to experiment whatever I wanted to, ask questions and just learn. I was like a sponge so everything thrown at me was super cool. At ten, I thought the whole experience was insane so I guess that is when my love for science started. Just seeing the cool things I could do and interacting with the environment was interesting.
Tashinga: John?
John: My love for Science started at about the same age. I used to play around with Lego Mindstorm robots. I remember playing with them and thinking about how cool it was to be able to do that. I found Lego super simple to build and program with simplistic language and have a drive around my house, I was like, “This is awesome!” It really got me into programming. The experience led me to participate in FIRST Robotics which is an international robotics competition. There were really great people there too, so it was huge for me.
Louise: What really is SciTeens and how does it benefit children who want to get into STEM? I suppose teenagers are the main focus as expressed in the name?
John: SciTeens aims to provide a global community of students aged 14 to 18 and get them started in the STEM pipeline. The whole point of this is to bridge the big disconnect that we noticed in the STEM community. We thought of how good it would be if we invited people through this common platform to share ideas and give each other feedback during their research and project development, share their work and gain a better understanding of how to get started in STEM. So not only will one receive feedback from their peers, they can also share their project and find opportunities in STEM regardless of their different problems and resource availability. They can also get mentorship opportunities with college professors, students, graduates and more.
Louise: I was looking at the website earlier and it looks amazing, it is going to be really helpful to people. I was looking through some of the projects and the feedback students got and I have to say that it is quite remarkable.
John: Thank you. That is exactly what we are aiming for, so I am glad people are getting help from our platform.
Tashinga: Good work guys.
Carlos: Thank you, we also understand that English is just one of many languages, so we also have our website in Spanish. Hopefully, we can add more languages in the near future to make it more accessible so that more people receive feedback that is more relatable.
Tashinga: How did you come up with the idea of SciTeens and did you get any outside help from friends or mentors?
Carlos: That is a great question. John and I went to a good school that was very supportive of those who wanted to do science projects. We had great classes, great mentors and professors. So we competed in a science fair and it was pretty cool. It was also my first official competition in a regional area as it was all over South Florida. When we went there, we noticed how there is a huge gap between what a project looks like when done by a student who goes to a good school and receives mentorship versus a student who does not go to a good school and comes from a low-income area. After speaking to some of the students, we found out that they had really great ideas and were very motivated. They just lacked resources to actively pursue their projects. Some students said they wished they could do something about that gap but did not know how to start. The experience motivated us to start up SciTeens because we realised that STEM should not have a high barrier to entry. It should be something everyone is able to do. Students must not think that they can or cannot succeed in STEM because of the resources that they have or do not have. So we wanted to explore how we could essentially give these resources in effective ways. The internet is currently everywhere and accessible so long as one has a phone or laptop, so we thought creating a website would be an effective way to provide the environment we dreamt of. We shared this idea with another friend and co-founder named Tasmin. He went to another school and he also saw this need for a platform where STEM could be pursued by anyone regardless of where they come from or what race they are. With this idea in mind, John was initially the one building the website, but we eventually graduated from high school and I went to MIT where I was able to get funding and mentors as well as reach out to professors. Along the way, we tried to get as much feedback as we could. John and I are only 20 so we are just getting started in life and it has been great so far. Many of our friends are at MIT and Yale and they have helped us a lot by giving mentorship and feedback, essentially bringing SciTeens to life.
Tashinga: Do you have any regrets, is there anything you look back to and think, “Oh, I wish we had done this or that?” How are you going to or are you already making that better? What steps are you going to take?
Carlos: That is a good question. I think we will both share some input on this one. I want to highlight one thing for sure and it is very useful when embarking on any venture. You have this project and you think, “Oh, this is amazing. Let me start everywhere and let me help everyone.” That is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, not really focusing on a certain area or a certain group or reaching out to a particular community. So I would say when we built SciTeens, we went through the first iteration of our website and then we just put it out there. We did not really have the foundation pertaining to the groups of students we wanted to work with. That is definitely something that, if I were to go back 3 or 4 years into the past, I would do differently. We are learning from our mistakes though, and it is thanks to those mistakes that we have gotten this far and we are just starting so there is so much more to come. Fortunately enough, this year we are not only working with students here in the United States but also with students in Zimbabwe and I think that has been a great learning experience for us.
John: I agree. I do not think we really have any regrets, it is more about the lessons we have learnt and I think that is huge. You can mess up, but as long as you learn from that, reiterate, and come up with new ideas, you can progress. Again, this relates to science- one can come up with an experiment, plan out their method “perfectly” and it gets tangled up anyway so they have to react to it by thinking of ways to reformulate it and approach it differently. I think it is very interesting.
Louise: So our next question is: what are your biggest achievements, both at SciTeens and in your scientific careers so far?
Carlos: That is another great question. I suppose when we think about our biggest achievements, we have to remember that John and I are only 20 years old. With that, I would say that one of our greatest achievements is SciTeens itself. Being our age, there are a lot of STEM unrelated issues that could interest us. It is an age where students hang out with friends or get out visiting cool places but I guess one of our biggest achievements is taking on this project at our age and actually making it into reality. At first, it was just talk but then once we took it more seriously, we competed across the country through one of the National Honour Societies for Entrepreneurship. We needed funding to start our project and we were able to win that competition among thousands of applicants. That is one of our biggest achievements as a team, as SciTeens. Once I was at MIT, I was also able to compete in one of their incubator projects and it was a bit intimidating because we were the youngest team at that point among people in their 20s or early 30s, people who already had experience in that field. For us, it was the first time venturing out into the world and trying to provide some service to the community. Despite being one of the youngest teams, we were able to win among PhD students. It was very frightening at first, but after a while presenting felt great because we knew that we truly believed in our submission and that it itself is an accomplishment. I can say for both John and I that we would not be in the position we are in without it. John is doing research right now and I am at MIT, a really great school. That speaks not only for what we have been able to build as a team but also shows how we individually look towards growing and challenging ourselves to make our dreams happen.
Tashinga: Now I would like to ask what type of advice you would give to anyone who is wishing to take on a STEM-related career, to those teenagers out there who just do not know where to start?
John: My two biggest pieces of advice are to take advantage of all the resources on the internet and to find a mentor. I can actually relate to my own story about pursuing robotics as a ten-year-old. I loved to code- super simple coding like little robots that performed goofy tasks such as line following or navigating my house. I learnt a lot of those skills online. There are so many resources like Youtube videos and articles on Google that you can use to find out more about any topic. I started to encounter some problems that were huge. I did not know how to approach a higher-level programming language or how to better construct robots to complete different tasks. This was really where a mentor came in. When I started in the FIRST Robotics program, I was paired with a mentor and that was huge for me. They were there to answer any of the questions I had, some things I could not really answer on my own. I think it is on you as a student to find these resources on your own, that is why we try to promote and provide as many resources as possible through our site. It is very important to get mentorship because once you have a mentor, they can answer all of the little questions whose answers are not easy to get out there. A really small aspect can be huge in that it can stop one from progressing in their project.
Louise: Our last question is quite a big question and it is: why do you think that STEM is so important?
Carlos: We see the problems currently in our world: coronavirus, climate change and so many more. These are all big issues upon us that need solving. The need to solve these issues shows how important STEM is nowadays, it shows how important it is for people to be knowledgeable about what science is or why certain topical issues are arising in the world. It is scary at the same time because in moments like these we realise that not everyone is educated or knows, for example, about masks. A lot of people do not understand what is so important about masks and that comes from not having a good basis in science. For us as youths, for you, for me, for John, we are still teenagers or we are at a young enough age to understand STEM’s value. The skills that we can acquire in a STEM topic at school are so enriching in terms of what we can do, whether or not we pursue science. Nowadays, more than ever, you find founders, CEOs, professors, entrepreneurs and many more all with STEM backgrounds. These professors did not go to school and learn education, they learnt chemistry, or they learnt biology and from there they were able to become teachers or CEOs. Elon Musk, for example, is a great businessman but he did not start as a businessman. He started as an electrical engineer so we can see that studying STEM does not automatically sentence one to pursue a career as a researcher. Instead, the skills learnt in these fields, especially problem-solving skills can be used by all. Science is all about problem-solving and reiterating, which is something that is really crucial and that can be valuable for students. Once you learn how to problem solve, how to break a problem into smaller problems or how to build a project, what can stop you from doing something completely unrelated to STEM using the same principles you learn or use in STEM? That is why it is so important nowadays to know STEM. If we go back to climate change or coronavirus, it is not going to be a team of just biologists or a team of just immunologists that solves this. It is going to be a team of biological engineers, chemical engineers, business enthusiasts and historians by all means. It is going to take a group of people who really understand the problem and see different ways of solving the pressing issue. I think that is what really makes STEM stand out. We need more connection in this world, especially now that everything is available online. How much more can information be shared now than it could be a century ago, regardless of whether it is a problem-solving skill or a project? The more people know about these things, the more they will be knowledgeable about how they work.
After talking to John and Carlos, it became clear that they are both very passionate about what they are doing for their community and that they have a very bright future, both with SciTeens and in their own scientific careers!
