I give back in the subjects I love most. I've taught STEM to elementary and middle schoolers, developed curriculum other instructors now use, mentored a middle-school FLL team for four years, and counseled at a cultural summer camp.
gbSTEM is a volunteer organization providing free STEM classes to elementary and middle schoolers, taught by high school and college volunteers. I joined as an instructor, teaching basic engineering for a semester, then intermediate engineering the next. I had enough feedback on the curriculum that I applied to become a curriculum developer myself — a role I held for a full year. In the spring of junior year, I went back to teaching for a semester, specifically so I could evaluate my own curriculum through an instructor's eyes again.
For about three months, I met weekly with two middle schoolers for hour-long check-ins on how their lives were going — the wins, the struggles, what they were looking forward to. The program was designed for high schoolers to give advice, but I found myself more often just facilitating: guiding the conversation and letting my mentees find their own answers, sometimes over an online game while we talked.
Two summers as a counselor, helping parent volunteers run enrichment activities and sports while also caring for a group of campers. My first year, I helped teach sustainability and looked after 4th graders; my second, I taught Ayurveda — the ancient tradition of medicine from India — and took care of a group of 5th graders.
Starting in 7th grade, I spent four years mentoring my younger brother's FLL team — watching their meetings, offering feedback, and occasionally teaching a technical concept I'd learned the hard way myself, years earlier, on my own FLL team. More on that team's story is on my Robotics page.