We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Justine Henning a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Justine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

Before heading to college, I asked someone at my high school what I should study once I got there. I told him that I enjoyed math, languages, literature, etc. He told me not to pursue math, that at the college level I would find it too abstract, having “nothing to do with the real world.” So when I arrived at Harvard and passed out of the math requirement, I decided not to pursue that interest, despite having made it to high school calculus and genuinely enjoying math.

Years later, talking with a friend who’s a mechanical engineer and circling back to math first as a homeschooling teacher and then as a tutor and finally also a student of college-level math, I realized that advanced math has *everything* to do with the real world. I also noted that most kids can learn to do math and enjoy it, given clear instruction, opportunities for practice and play, and self confidence. And I learned that we need more — and more diverse — students to go into the sciences, tech, engineering, and math. But how, I wondered, can we attract children to these careers if most do not even know what they are? My own grandfather was an engineer and as a child I had no idea what that meant.

I decided to create Math4Science by interviewing and profiling people with STEM degrees, sharing the profiles online with young students and their math teachers, and giving them opportunities to ask their own questions of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians. Now all students can access information about these careers (on our Jobs in STEM page — https://math4science.org/jobs-in-stem/) and discover the ways they identify with and are inspired by people who use math to learn about and improve the real world.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

What makes Math4Science stand out?

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

For our first few years, most of the students we reached were my students (I was tutoring math and teaching it part-time at a wonderful New York City public school). I brought in Becky Walzer, the semi-retired former co-director of Urban Academy Laboratory High School, to run M4S@School — the programming we do in classrooms. She put us in public school classrooms around the city. In the meantime, I moved to Maine and began to move us into classrooms here. And a few Math4Science scientists wrote us into their National Science Foundation grants, which are putting us into schools in Virginia, Texas, and Colorado. We have the opportunity to present Math4Science at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in September, which should extend our national reach. All of this and the e-blasts our team puts out, recent rebranding run by Byron Chamorro (our webmaster and in-house designer) and the ways El Wilson (our social media and communications manager) has expanded our presence on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, and beyond have helped us reach more kids and their teachers. The chair of our board of directors (Civil Engineer Tysheina Robertson) and my sister Dara Henning (our development and marketing director) have also been vital as we expand.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Math4Science is a nonprofit. For us a success story or “sale” involves inspiring a child. Here are a few examples of that:

Years ago, we brought Civil Engineer Tysheina Robertson into a Brooklyn public middle school math classroom. Students had read her M4S profile https://math4science.org/tysheina-robertson/ and learned that she had grown up in Harlem.

When she joined us in the classroom, one student raised his hand and asked whether Tysheina, who was then helping build Denver’s first commuter rail, whether she had lived in a housing project in Harlem. Without missing a beat, she said no but also that she grew up right near the Drew Hamilton Houses.

The subtext there — a student asking “Can someone from my world really become an engineer like you?” — and the grace with which Tysheina made it clear that the answer is “Yes!” explains the need for and success of Math4Science.

More recently I helped prepare students on an island in Maine to meet with a physicist and a civil engineer, STEAM residents at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Our Spark a Conversation question that day was “What have you built or what would you like to build?” One of the high schoolers had built several mountain dulcimers. Then he learned that Rob Hart, the physicist he was about to meet, had researched and helped build violins! https://math4science.org/rob-hart/

You never know how kids will connect with our STEM mentors. Another student in the same classroom — on a rural island in Maine — found out that Civil Engineer Janet Hollingsworth had helped design the enormous models of dinosaurs bursting through the children’s museum he had visited often when he lived in Indianapolis.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://math4science.org/category/meet-the-scientists/
• Instagram: @math4science
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095343992260
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/math4science/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/math4sci
• Other: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@math4sci?_t=8lIerwk9mFm&_r=1 Threads https://www.threads.net/@math4science

Image Credits
Justine Henning