Maydm Works to Support Girls and Youth of Color in Experiencing Stem: A Great Equalizer (Part 2 of 2)
Since it was founded in 2015, Maydm — a construct for Made By Them — has been helping girls and students of color explore the world of STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Its founder — Winnie Karanja — and the people who manage Maydm now were tired of being “the only one” in the room in class and the workplace and decided to help the succeeding generations develop, nurture and pursue an interest in STEM related fields and careers.
Maydm’s offices on S. Patterson Street are flexible work spaces that can be flexed to meet the needs of the programs it offers. And in many ways, this reflects to flexibility and design of Maydm’s offerings to meet middle school and high school students where they are in space and personal development to provide a progression of programming that allows students to take their interest in STEM as far as they want to take it in higher education, the labor market and beyond.
“We absolutely continue to have middle school programming as a focus because we know that the groups that we work with, especially girls, are interested in STEM in middle school and maybe in high school,” said Dr. Christina Outlay, Maydm’s executive director. “We have to get our girls and our other underrepresented students hooked in middle school and early high school years. Our ultimate focus is that in our workforce development program, we’re preparing our students and providing them with earned income right now while they are young and can support themselves and their households and provide them with real career experience and connections to local employers. We want to make sure that folks know that at Maydm, we are also providing earned income, skill development and opportunities for our youth.”
Maydm’s programming begins with middle school students. It’s designed to allow the students to explore a diverse range of STEM-related areas so that they can find the area that most appeals to them.
“We have STEMism and STEM Power,” said Benjamin “Ben” Pate, Maydm’s program manager. “One is all girls, one’s all gender. But that is a program in summer that is 4-5 categories of different subtopics. Sometimes it is coding, sometimes 3-D printing. It’s meant to be the same thing. It just depends on the equipment or if we get something new in. It’s meant to give students a chance to have an intro to a bunch of different topics where they can be, ‘I like this one a lot more.’ And then they can dive into it on their own and with us at the same time.”
Johanna Taylor, the lead instructor, emphasized that they show the students the interconnectedness of the various STEM fields.
“The first year we did it was solar power connected to smart green houses,” Taylor said about a program they did at Madison College. “We get to go visit the campus green houses and the crazy plants that they grow. The goal is trying to do something that was a little bit unique and connect it more broadly and expand it out. We tend to do a lot of technology and engineering programs. But I want to make sure that I am connecting with students who are like, ‘Maybe engineering isn’t my thing. I’m more interested in design. I’m more interested in a math or a business focus.’ We bring in how all of these things are connected, but they are still STEM.”
And then as the students enter high school, the programming becomes more subject-specific.
“For our high school students, we have two programs that rotate every year,” Pate said. “So we have our Scholars in the summer and our Futures. Both have an all genders and an all girls track for each of them. They rotate within a five-year span so that no one ever does it twice. If you are a seventh grader and you do it all the way through until you are a senior, you will never do the same program twice. But you can learn five different topics. This year, we’re doing Webdev. Last year, we did Robotics. We also do an app development. For our Futures, we’ve done multiple different things too, but it is newer. It’s only our third year coming up this summer. Our first year was energy, but not fully that. It was a little bit more about learning about engineering.”
There is also the Creators Lab for high school students who want to dive deeper into a subject area.
“That’s where the students who do have that deep interest and really have that rooted in something that they want to learn about, they will create that thing,” Pate said. “We had one student last year make a website about cybersecurity. It told how to make a password correctly. It told you the harms of it all. Also coded in there was an auto-password generator. Probably other students in other classes probably couldn’t do that. Some of our instructors can’t teach that. But he had such a deep passion for it that he could figure it out someone by himself, but also with the help of an instructor to build it out so that it is actually useful and actually works. He bought a web address for a minute. I’m not sure why he did. But he bought it for a minute and then he was able to have other students try it and post it out there to the world for a hot minute. As well, there are other students who have tried to build drones and weight sensors for his laundry and other stuff like that. But it is harder to do not necessarily finished. But they saw themselves liking it a lot. So they wanted to keep sticking around doing things like that.”
Some of the staff have nicknamed Creators Lab STEMpreneurs because it acts as an incubator where the students can develop something where who knows, maybe it could be a commercial success.
“They get a budget,” Pate said. “They get a stipend to essentially do whatever they want within the STEM world. We give them some guidelines of participation, going to see other businesses and consequences so that they are keeping up with their stuff. You get paid and you also get to show off your project. We dive more into, ‘We’re giving you a budget. We’re giving you the chance to build whatever you can possibly think of within these four walls.’ But at the same time, that has built out a space where students have solved everyday problems for themselves, but also solved problems that other people might need solved. One student tried to build a fan blade cleaner. It didn’t work perfectly. But it was able to slide on a rail and it had two sides where you could wrap around a paper towel and put it on your fan blade and just throw the dust off. He had a practical idea. It practically worked. It could be used by other people in a sense. But it was limited to his fan blade that he brought in. There are limitations and there are trials and errors. But at the same time, they are showing that they have a way of solving a common problem for everyday people at the age of 16-18-years old.”
The piece de resistance, so to speak, is the internship program, which draws on students from the Creators Lab and Madison College’s STEM Academy.
“The internship program is a summer internship starting in June and ending in August, 6-8 weeks long,” said Lennise O’Dwyer, who coordinates the internships. “Typically we recruit 30-35 students. That’s the hope for 2026. Our internship program has been around since 2021. And it has grown exponentially over the years. We have partnered with over 17 companies. It works like a matchmaking process. Students come to us with STEM interests. And we look to see if we have their job interests in our arsenal. We match them with the job that they want or have some interest in.”
The internships are real-life work situations that can lead to other STEM opportunities.
“They get paid a minimum of $18 per hour,” O’Dwyer said. “We pride ourselves in that. They get the option to work part-time or full-time. One thing that I love about our internship program is that it really solidifies whether the students will go on to continue in STEM or not. We’ve had a few students who have said the internship has solidified their desire to continue a career in engineering or information technology. Or they have said that they don’t want to do that. It gives them the opportunity to further explore their interests in college. We’ve had students who have gone on to study engineering.”
Taylor also emphasized that there is a lot of collateral skill development that will benefit students as they enter college and beyond.
“Especially as students get into high school in our programs that we are focusing on skills that they can take outside of STEM,” Taylor said. “A lot of times, with some of our two week programs, they will end with a group project presentation thing. It’s a skill set that there isn’t always time to develop earlier in high school, but you will definitely need in the workforce or if you go to a university. And our Creators Lab students and our internship students go through resume building and interview skills. There are Creators Lab students who learn to budget out their project and keep track of their money. Again there are skills that are important in the workforce in general beyond just specifically the STEM fields.”
The Maydm programs also expand the talent pool of people who can instruct the younger students.
“We also had students come back and be instructors for our summer program,” Pate said. “They’ll go to college at UW-Madison or Whitewater. They’ll come home for the summer — especially their freshman to junior years when they don’t have a placement for the summer — and be instructors for our students. And they can also share their experience of being just like them in the past and having those same experiences. ‘I did this program five years ago and we did this and we did that.’ Our current model has only been around for four years or so and so we are also building out new stories every single day with that mindset of where are our students going and what is going to happen. I think we are having our first big cohort of students graduating this year. We’ll be able to see where they are at and where they are going to be and what jobs they are looking at. And we’ll probably get even more kids reaching out to get references and letters and help with jobs in the area.”
And the internships are making a difference in the young people’s lives.
“With our internships, we are really excited,” Outlay said. “We are starting to have employers who will keep an intern there as a part-time employee or extending their internship. We have young people who are earning money in careers and getting experience right out of high school.”
With the increasing demand for skilled employees in a tech-savvy world, Maydm is equalizing the playing field, making sure that girls and students of color are part of the solution to society’s technical needs.