Summer greetings to everyone! I hope you are able to take some restorative time and engage in your favorite summer activities. I have realized that I scheduled myself for too many conferences, workshops, and other activities, so have made some plans to not let the summer of 2025 be as full! A lot of our discussions focus on partnerships and relationships, but we also want to acknowledge how important it is to prioritize self-care and down time. Our culture values (idolizes) busy-ness, and it takes significant effort to break that implicit norm and instead to slow down and be okay with unscheduled or unstructured time (and maybe all of you have already mastered this... I’m committed to working on this for me).
In this newsletter, you’ll see a number of interesting articles including: a link to an S-STEM REC blog post by our own Matt Voigt, sharing a community cultural wealth framework with practical S-STEM examples; a Q&A with Dr. Rebekkah Dupont, who is returning from Augsburg University this summer; a Q&A with Abbegail Bowers, a Nebraska S-STEM Scholar who was able to present research she did in part through an REU at the Nebraska affiliate of the American Mathematics Association for Two Year Colleges; a Q&A with Dr. Panther from the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UNL about an REU initiative; and an overview of a workshop proposal the PROSPECT research team submitted to the fall S-STEM Scholar and PI Symposium, focused on equitable partnership practices--we include a brief list of questions you might pose with your own team.
I look forward to reconnecting with the PROSPECT team with regular meetings this fall!