I am an active member of the STEM Outreach Program at the Ohio State University. As a member of the organization I get to travel to elementary, middle, and high schools around the Ohio State University campus and demonstrate several different scientific concepts. These include “the jumping jack” which utilizes a battery, two wires and a spool of copper wire to make a nail “jump” (due to the electromagnetic interactions between the aforementioned materials). I originally discovered the STEM Outreach program at the student involvement fair, which stuck out to me due to my deep love of science and math. Additionally, the club seemed especially fitting as I’d just left a managerial position at a Kumon in my hometown to attend Ohio State. Kumon is an early learning center for children aged three to seventeen with an emphasis on reading and math as well as improving how quickly the students can complete computations. As a manager I got to work directly with students and experienced first hand the joy of teaching. While I did enjoy working with the younger students and teaching toddlers their letters and numbers, my favorite students were those a little farther along in the program. Often the reading older students did for the program covered advanced principals of physics or major historical events in a relatively digestible fashion. Such as one paper students were required to read that explained the time warping effects of travel near the speed of light by utilizing the “light bouncing off of moving mirrors” treatment. While the questions presented to the students themselves were relatively straight forward (who wrote the theory of relativity? When did he publish it?) the questions that the students had after reading such a work were far more enjoyable for me to answer. Often after reading something as mind boggling as the basics of special relativity students would ask “is this true?” or “how can such a thing be?”. While I was unable to present the atomic clock experiments to the students at the center I was able to explain the results of the tests and their far reaching ramifications, such as length dilation and gravitational lensing. On one such occasion I was even able to explain the twin paradox, to a set of twins! The higher level math problems that the students worked on were also very fun to solve with them. 
I enjoyed reciting old rhymes I had learned as a child (“multiplying fractions is no problem the top times the top and the bottom times the bottom” and the quadratic formula to the tune of “pop goes the weasel”) and getting to see the students face light up when they finally grasped what initially seemed like an impossible concept. It is my hope that through my involvement with the Ohio State University’s STEM Outreach program I will be able to spark a love of learning in many more students. Than I know I will be able to contribute to the field of science in a fashion beyond just research; by inspiring the next generation of innovators.