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Welcome to the first posting for The Bunsen Burner: Avonworth commentary with a scientific flair, written by senior Lyla Sebeck.
The first topic is about the range of available STEM subjects to study as a high school student in PA.
As someone scientifically minded, I try to keep an eye on what careers my fellow STEM nerds are pursuing, and as a senior, it feels especially prudent. As I look at everyone taking the next step in their lives, I have to wonder: why is so much of it in healthcare? In my opinion, this healthcare-focused bias at Avonworth’s comes from a mix of local opportunity and our desire for a stable, well-paying career.
In my opinion, part of it comes from Pittsburgh’s position as a healthcare powerhouse (we have The Pitt, for goodness sake!), with hospitals, internships, shadowing opportunities, and so much visibility; it makes sense that the Health and Medicine calendar is always full.
Additionally, recent cuts to scientific research may be unconsciously pushing us towards “safer” careers. In the last two years, the Trump administration has canceled over $11 billion in research grants to labs and universities. With all this uncertainty about science, it makes sense that we would want careers that are always in demand, not at the whims of government employees deciding whether our research or expertise “mattered.”
While I see this pattern at Avonworth, it extends to at least the state of Pennsylvania. During my time at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Sciences, where 72 of approximately the nerdiest high school juniors from across Pennsylvania gather, at least half of the students wanted to go into healthcare, filling biology research projects and labs to excess. In my own physics lab, a girl in my group was placed in her 3rd-choice lab after the biology and chemistry labs reached capacity, while the physics, computer science, and math labs had few people, sometimes in the single digits.
Over half of the students took a neuroscience course directly related to applications and medicine, and somehow I ended up in it too. It felt somewhat isolating, as I was always drawn to the space and physics side of STEM. I eventually found people with those same interests as me, but I will admit it took quite a while. Even so, among my closest friends from this summer science program, I count a geneticist, someone going premed, a biology researcher, and an environmental scientist. Even in my own personal friend group, we see a bias towards the life sciences.
I mean no insult to those pursuing healthcare; it is a noble field with many of its own advantages, and a field I personally could not pursue for a wealth of reasons. However, it is hard not to mourn the other STEM fields that are often underrepresented at Avonworth. In my own pathway, the STEM pathway, there are 16 members, compared to 38 in the Health and Medicine Pathway. More than double!
I don’t want to tell anyone not to follow their healthcare-related dreams; I know many people pursue medicine because they truly want to, but part of me wants us to explore more fields. Not just that, I wish there were more visibility, that being good at math or science didn’t automatically steer us toward medicine or even engineering, and that the world wasn’t in a position where we felt the need to choose a “safe” career over our dreams.
