Blame the lightsabers. That’s what led me to become a professor. As a high school student, one of my major life goals was to figure out how to build an actual light sword. Doing so is all but impossible, so it didn’t really matter if I went into engineering or science, but I pursued STEM just the same. By the time I was an undergraduate, I’d settled on physics. After that, I went to graduate school to study even more physics until I finally earned a PhD.
No lightsaber ever came to be, but I’ve been teaching undergraduates science for more than 25 years. Genuine interest in STEM—and maybe (again) Star Wars—has brought many students to my classroom, but over time that enthusiasm has waxed and waned.
Particularly now. When it comes to pursuing an education, and ultimately a career, in STEM, there’s far more uncertainty than there was 10 or 15 years ago. Especially for 2025’s incoming college students. For one, the Trump administration’s attempts to curtail funding for “woke” studies has led to cuts in funding for lots of scientific research. For another, there’s artificial intelligence, which frequently gets touted as the tool capable of making the next big breakthrough all on its own.
What’s a student to do? Is STEM no longer the ticket to a career in a challenging and fascinating field? It is, but explaining why isn’t simple. Science rarely is.
Most importantly, high schoolers thinking of pursuing STEM need to understand—and be compelled by—the fields themselves. (Fun fact: The acronym used to be SMET. Didn’t really roll off the tongue.) To study science, one has to know how humans do science.
In short, science is the process of building models. What’s a model? Let’s go with the easiest example: a globe, which is a model of Earth. It’s of course not the Earth but it shows some properties of the actual planet (like the shape and the location of the continents). But it doesn’t show the size, mass, or location of the nearest coffee shop–you have to find that yourself. Scientific models don’t have to be equations, they can be physical or conceptual things.