Iris Li – Spring 2021 Award Recipient

Our next award recipient is Iris Li, a 10th grader at Jefferson High School. For her service project, she founded Superposition Daly City on the basis of supporting and empowering females in the STEM field. Below are the details of her project and how it has impacted her community & herself. Watch her interview here.

My project, Superposition Daly City, was founded in November 2020. Superposition Daly City is the Daly City chapter of the international nonprofit organization, Superposition. It is founded on the basis and mission of supporting and empowering females in the STEM field. My initial thoughts when founding this chapter was to support the young females in my local community, especially in the schools in Daly City. Daly City is a small city next to San Francisco. Since it is a small city, it provides very limited resources to its residents and does not meet the needs of its students fully. As a student and resident of Daly City, I saw the struggles of the students in my schools and founded this chapter wanting to solve and eliminate their problems and stress over this issue. Since Superposition Daly City was officially confirmed as a chapter of Superposition in November 2020, I have begun to plan out workshops and various events targeted mainly at young females in Daly City. In February, I hosted the chapter’s first event, the 3 day Test Prep Panel series with my team. In the panel series, we covered test prep topics from the SAT to AP exams. We invited speakers from PSAT merit finalists to a Barnard college student. We had 42 sign-ups and attendees from places around the world, not only from Daly City. Although the event was hosted virtually through zoom, we had attendees and speakers interacting and using the event to learn more about standardized testing. In the past month of May, we posted a STEAM opportunities post series on Instagram where each day we posted opportunities on one topic. In May, my team and I researched STEAM opportunities ranging from scholarships to internships. We would input the research opportunities into the created graphics and I would post them at the beginning of the week. Through the sharing of these resources, it allows for the students in Daly City and worldwide to know and explore these possible opportunities that they can take on. This allows them to explore the STEM field and learn more about it. Since the founding of the chapter, more students became engaged with our Instagram account and it grew to 1494 followers on Instagram. Recently, I entered our chapter into the Roundpier Social Impact competition. We won runner-up in the competition and were awarded $100. With this funding, I can plan out more events for our students.

Since I began working on this project, I learned, improved, and grew immensely. From my experiences in this project, I learned how to reach out to speakers for events, partnerships, and how to properly promote and increase our number of attendees. I learned how to manage time efficiently to complete things accordingly and in an organized manner. Additionally, the time I spent with my team taught me how to work in a team and how teamwork makes the dream work. I learned to work with other individuals and communicate with them to better move forward with the project. With the skills I gained from this project, I will be able to apply them to my future journeys. I will be able to use them again in college, in future careers, and when working with society. As I continue to move forward with this project, I will continue to grow and learn from the things it has to teach me. Lastly, through this project, I have learned how to incorporate a project with my personal life, such as splitting time between working on the project while balancing academics and splitting time out for myself and my mental health.