STEM-Powered Girls: Meet Keystone’s Young Leaders Who Challenge Gender Stereotypes
The field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has gathered steam in recent decades, especially after the world entered the digital age. However, a huge gender gap in this area persists as women still account for “ a small minority of the world’s researchers .” This imbalance often begins in education —the lack of it, or how it is shaped by cultural stereotypes and notions about the role of women—and continues in workplaces and other social settings.
Young girls around the world who are immersed in STEM education are actively challenging constructs and breaking biases to make way for their peers and other people impacted by the issue. Such is the undertaking of four members of ’s Class of 2021, all of whom are being driven by their growing knowledge of the field and enlightened by the strength of their cultural identity. We introduce Keystone’s STEM-powered girls: Symonne Liu, the microbiology enthusiast; Tori Gu, the budding biologist; Jamie Mo, the young puzzler; and Angela Wang, the aspiring engineer-entrepreneur.
Microbiology enthusiast Symonne Liu welcomes everyone to her “Garden of eden”
It was very late in the evening, and yet Symonne Liu’s bedroom was still buzzing with activity, quite literally. She had the liveliest roommates ever: thirty-six fruit flies, each nestled in a test tube. She had recently snuck them into her “lab,” disguised as a room of a 17 year old, while her grandmother was glued on the television downstairs, watching a program that touted the benefits of traditional Chinese medicine.
One peculiar herb that her nainai has always raved about is the caterpillar fungus , a medical mushroom formed when a parasitic fungus germinates in living larvae of various moth genera, consuming and mummifying them in the process. Symonne has wondered about the efficacy of the so-called divine elixir that could cure illnesses. Grandma supported her claims with either ambiguous Chinese philosophy or the television host’s ebullient spiels.
Unmoved by the hype, Symonne enlisted the help of the hissing crew to uncover the mystery behind grandma’s favorite snake oil. She published her findings in her Extended Essay (EE) for the Higher Level Biology course in ’s International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme.
In her “lab”, Symonne divided the hissing crew into two “families” nicknamed Anna and Bob and spoiled them with a generous breakfast of freshly mashed bananas for 27 days. Only the Anna group, though, was given bananas coated with ground caterpillar fungus. Interestingly, that same family lived two days longer than the ones deprived of the fungus.
“It seems the herb wasn’t snake oil after all,” Symonne mumbled after reaching her eureka moment.
She has had many similar instances since her first dive into what she calls her “Garden of Eden”—the world of microorganisms made visible by a light microscope she received from her parent at an early age.
For a curious girl, this microcosm was a sight so splendid that she chaired a primary school biology club to introduce writhing life forms to her peers. When she was away from the microscope, Symonne zoomed out her view to their family garden, watching or occasionally joining her mother plant flowers. There, insects were her playmates, and blooming shrubs and grasses were their playpens.
Symonne’s childhood moments in nature have led her to a major hobby and current niche, bio-art , or artworks produced by natural life processes or through using living matter, juggling it with laboratory explorations, especially during her time at . She once experimented on slime molds placed on a petri dish with two pinches of cereal grains. To her surprise, the mold slithered randomly across the heaps, leaving behind a yellow trail that resembled a yin-yang symbol. She likened the process to the “natural pattern of life” that challenges the “existing linear pathway” of human thinking.
“What’s wrong with a squiggly curve?” she wrote in an essay, reflecting on that test she did during the distance learning period in 2020. “When people decide on their life journeys, many will choose the shortest route—the straight line between points A and B. Don’t we all love quick wins? But by always picking the simplest path, we lose the infinite possibility of alternate opportunities.”
Symonne herself had a detour just before starting middle school. After completing traditional education at her primary school, she transferred to in Grade 7, struggling to move from the traditional curriculum to the International Baccalaureate mindset. Back then, Symonne doubted the inclusion of martial arts as a class. Later on, she understood how the class strengthened not only a student’s body but also their cultural identity, leading her to muse on teaching martial arts as a hobby.
Over the years, Symonne has breezed through the twists and turns of a new learning method in a new community, producing impressive works or taking on reflective experiments in the process, just like her moldy yin-yang test. Between 2018 and 2020, she came up with a striking collection of bio-artistic productions to comment on social issues.
In her “The Shadow of shadow” installation—where a waxy, blue grime drips from traditional shadow puppets hanging above a large bathtub—Symonne criticized the commodification of Chinese culture by the globalized society. Her “Xyue” sculpture—a depiction of the lunar cycle showing moon phases made of soiled tampons—alludes to the “natural miracle” of women’s fertility while challenging the “shame culture imposed by the patriarchal society.”
Symonne’s “Xyue” sculpture
One of the recent co-curricular projects that she and fellow friends worked on was the “ Living Gaoyao ,” a thin film with organic substances targeted to soothe inflammation in knee joints. They attempted to find a long-term cure for arthritis, a condition that has hassled Symonne’s very own grandma despite trying various treatment options, including TCM. Their pursuit won them a gold medal at the 2020 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition .
“My ambition is to dig into small organisms for a big cause,” Symonne said. “In the future, I want to study if genetically engineered bacteriophages can defeat multi-drug resistant bacteria to save the world from growing antibiotic resistance.” She will continue this aspiration in her biology studies at the University of Chicago, where she feels confident about linking her passion for microbiology to genetics, medicine, and other research fields.
Symonne has already made great strides toward that ambition—even back at their home in Beijing. She actually rushed downstairs after that test on the caterpillar fungus to inform grandma she was successful. With a smug grin, nainai said, “I told you so.” But Symonne paused and responded with a smirk, “No, my roommates told me so.”
Budding Biologist Tori Gu learns about the world from observing nature
Tourists strolled across a trail at a koala sanctuary on Phillip Island in Australia, adoring the marsupials that were seemingly observing people. As they proceeded, a sweet, camphor-like scent lingered over the path, so strong and familiar that it stopped the student traveler Tori Gu in her track.
Some months earlier, Tori went on a four-week student exchange trip to Bogota, Colombia. Her local host family had a sprawling finca (ranch) that teemed with exotic plants, including a strange yet fascinating tree with blade-like leaves and bunches of white spikes that smelled like camphor. Those clumps were flowers of the invasive species locally known as el arbol de la corteza de papel—Tori’s host brother explained in Spanglish—and that locals used their aromatic seeds to relieve nasal congestion. She procured some fragrant leaf samples and glued them onto some pages of her journal.
“I knew it was the exact smell,” Tori gushed. “But the feeling was so different,” because she recognized that tree, or the , in its native place in Australia, thousands of kilometers away from where she had first seen it.
Tori’s almost-worn-out notebook was filled to the brim with stories like this, and even a plethora of specimens—from plant samples to short messages written in various languages by the random people she had met in her travels around the world. There was one memorable page from her home turf at : a pinecone seed that “[hints] at the magic of nature.”
The school’s tallest pine tree ushers students either into the Middle School library or toward the quadrangle. Tori rarely noticed it until she volunteered as a teaching buddy in
Discover top international day and boarding schools in Asia with ease! Use our advanced filters to find the perfect fit for your child based on curriculum, tuition fees, and more. Plus read honest reviews from real parents and get a clear understanding of tuition and other costs. Start your journey towards the right school today.
