At SMASH Academy, STEM studies open the door to computer science, community, and college

For their app development project, Johanna Nguyen and her groupmates wanted to work on something close to their hearts. It didn’t take the four long to find a connection.

“All of our parents were immigrants, and they all had the personal struggle of figuring out how to get education in a new country where they didn’t really speak the language,” explained Nguyen, a junior at Braintree High School. “We thought about what we really cared about, and immigration and helping immigrants was a big one.”

This sort of commonality is typical of student interactions at Northeastern’s SMASH Academy. In fact, it’s designed into the program.

Image of students provided by SMASH Academy (smash.org).

SMASH Academy is a free national program that prepares high-achieving students from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM to pursue college studies and careers in STEM. The program launched at UC Berkley in 2004 with a focus on local low-income and first-generation students, and it has since expanded to ten universities across the United States.

Northeastern joined the program in 2020 with support from the Akamai Foundation. With new support from Boston-based home security company SimpliSafe—a contribution of $50,000 per year for three years—Khoury College is preparing to welcome SMASH scholars to a hybrid residential–virtual summer program for the first time in 2022.

SimpliSafe’s connection originated when Chief Technology Officer Don Nelson sat in on a SMASH information session led by Carla Brodley, then dean of Khoury College. Nelson was instantly intrigued and wanted to get involved.

Image of SimpliSafe engineers and staff provided by the company.

“We’re an inclusive brand. We want everyone to be safe,” said Laura Young, SimpliSafe’s associate public relations manager. “And if we want to make everyone safe, we need to have as many diverse voices as possible. This is a program that’s going to allow us to do this and hopefully introduce new people to the world of engineering and technology.”

Immersion in STEM projects and college prep

All SMASH Academy students—whether at Northeastern or elsewhere—enroll in ninth grade in classes of 35, then participate in three years of educational programming, concentrated mostly during the summer, to help them build STEM skills and college preparedness. Classes are divided into three buckets: integrated STEM learning projects where students design solutions to social issues; a college success preparatory program to help students navigate things like financial aid and university applications; and a STEM concentration—in the case of SMASH Northeastern, computer science.

Founding Site Director of SMASH Northeastern Jo Browne said that when many people hear about supplemental academics, they mistakenly believe the program must be remedial. SMASH, he said, is far from that. Instead, the rigorous program works to put academically advanced students from historically underrepresented groups on even footing with their more advantaged, often white peers. It also aims to build community and provide diverse role models in whom students can see themselves.

Johanna Nguyen’s project was a part of the integrated STEM learning projects bucket. She and her groupmates took the skills they had built over the previous two years in subjects like coding and data analysis to build an app that helps immigrants and English-as-a-Second-Language speakers learn to enroll themselves or their children in the Boston Public Schools system. The app, which was originally proposed by Immigration Family Services Institute, won the class-wide project competition and went on to compete against SMASH Academy projects at other East Coast university sites.

“This was an awesome connection between a local organization and students on social justice work,” Browne said.

Technology learning projects, social justice, and community

All the SMASH projects focus on social justice and community. Bryan Ayala, a junior at Excel Academy High School, worked on an app called Neighborly to help connect evicted neighbors with more affordable housing during the height of the pandemic. It also allowed people to share their eviction stories and get help from the community.

“It was a great experience to be a part of this [SMASH Academy] community. They were people just like me, and many of them also shared very similar goals to me,” Ayala said. “It really helped me step out of my comfort zone, helped me build confidence with talking to people and meeting people.”

Image of students provided by SMASH Academy (smash.org).

Project-based learning isn’t the only avenue SMASH Academy offers for students like Ayala and Nguyen to explore their skills and passions. Workshops and presentations from local STEM professionals and nonprofit organizations also help students experiment with professional applications for their new skills. GreenRoots, a community-based environmental justice organization in Chelsea, is one such partner; the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) is another.

“They were using data that they collected to analyze the demographics of the greater Boston area,” Nguyen said of the BARI-led summer session she attended. “I really saw that data analysis can be applied not just to real life around the world, but real life in my community.”

SimpliSafe’s commitment to diversity in tech

Alongside the program’s academic goals, Browne has a broader vision for SMASH Academy: making its local, diverse students feel more welcome at Northeastern and across STEM.

“Here’s this broader vision that we’re on the way towards realizing, where folks can see a bunch of these students from Dorchester, from East Boston, from other surrounding areas sitting and working and engaging in computer science right here in this [Northeastern campus] space and know that they’re also welcome,” Browne said.

While the vision hasn’t been realized yet because of the pandemic and the virtual setting, it is a vital force in the program’s mission.

Image of SimpliSafe engineers and staff provided by the company.

“Ultimately we want to see the face of STEM careers shifting and being more inclusive of folks who have historically been left out,” Browne said.

That vision of inclusivity is a big part of the reason SimpliSafe selected SMASH for their donation.

“In the tech industry, there are a lot of individuals—particularly people of color, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds—who really get shut out of tech for lack of opportunity,” said Leah Press, associate director of people operations at SimpliSafe. “With SMASH really working towards giving those scholars that opportunity, it aligns with what SimpliSafe is trying to do—to give everyone a chance to be a part of our mission, to make everyone feel safe.”

SimpliSafe has committed $150,000 over the next three years for the Northeastern SMASH Academy to use as it sees fit. It is also working to connect SMASH students with SimpliSafe engineers as mentors.

Image of SimpliSafe engineers and staff provided by the company.

“I think where the mentorship piece comes in is getting insight into what is available. What does it mean to be an engineer?” Browne said. “Getting students to appreciate that, for one, but also the multitude of paths that people take to get where they’re going … It usually isn’t linear, there are a lot of things that come up, a lot of things to overcome. One of the values of having a long-term relationship is that folks get to be a little bit more vulnerable about their journeys—where they fell and where they got up again to ultimately succeed.”

Summer on campus with Khoury faculty and industry mentors

Laney Strange, associate teaching professor and director of broadening participation at Khoury College, commended the students’ ability to study and build a community online, but notes that in-person attendance will improve the student experience.

“Along with three other Khoury faculty members, I co-taught a computer science elective for SMASH scholars last July, and it was the highlight of my entire summer,” Strange said. “It was still remote, which has its limitations, so I’m excited to bring scholars to campus, see and work with them in person, and have them experience true Northeastern life.”

As the program continues to grow and develop, Nguyen has some simple advice for younger students.

Image of students provided by SMASH Academy (smash.org).

“Please, please, please apply to SMASH. It’s an amazing program; you get to meet adults that are your role models and students that share the same interests as you,” Nguyen said, emphasizing that the application and program are both free.

SimpliSafe’s Laura Young spoke with the same enthusiasm about SMASH and the value it places on incorporating role models from industry into the program: “Not only is that going to fire up the student, it’s going to fire up that engineer as well.” She added that a mentoring relationship has as much of a “meaningful impact” for their engineering team as it does for students.

Jo Browne, commenting on the “win-win” potential of the SMASH mentoring piece, agreed, noting, “There’s sort of two sides of sharing that get to come out in this kind of experience.”

Jane Kokernak and Aditi Peyush contributed to this story.

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