Q&A with Norah Ahmed, UE High School Changemaker Challenge winner
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Norah Ahmed, an Evansville Day School student, won the University of Evansville’s 11th annual High School Changemaker Challenge this year. The competition aims to motivate young people to take on leadership roles by identifying and solving global challenges through innovation and creativity.
Ahmed, who will be a senior this fall, spoke with Inside INdiana Business about her first-place idea, STEMpire, and the nonprofit’s upcoming conference.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you learn about the Changemaker Challenge?
We had a senior at my school, Evansville Day School. His name was Tyler Myers. He won it the year I was on the track team with him, and he always spoke about it with a lot of kindness. He was very fond of it.
The school that I go to promotes the Changemaker Challenge, and usually, because it’s small, we only have one or two a year who could try and go for it. I went for it the year after, and I did not win. I got somewhere in the top six, not the top three. I returned the next year. The first year I did it, I had a partner. The next year, I did not have a partner. And that was the year I won the Changemaker Challenge.
Why did you keep entering the competition?
I liked the people I met through it. I had a lot of fun with the experience. I knew that I wanted to pursue my nonprofit, STEMpire, regardless of what happened with the competition.
A lot of the fun with doing STEMpire was collaborating with the people at UE and being able to build something and feel like you had a team behind you. That’s unique about UE, where the people I met there were eager to help and had many great connections. I was able to bring STEMpire much further than I would have ever been able to on my own.
Where did you get the idea for STEMpire?
It was tough because I knew I wanted to do the Changemaker Challenge before I knew what I wanted to do. It wasn’t like I came into it with my heart deadset on something with some deep passion. All I knew was that I wanted to lead an initiative. That was something I cared about.
I went to the Changemaker Challenge website, and I don’t know if this is still on there, but it was the year they said we love projects—and are able to help more with projects—that address the following areas: climate change, physical exercise, Evansville Promise Neighborhood, women in STEM. I saw “women in STEM” and thought that applied to me.
I looked up what [Promise Neighborhood] is, and I thought, “Okay, this is something that’s in the community. This is an actual thing I can make measurable progress with because the progress there is already being tracked by the grants we receive federally for it.”
Because we know there’s an issue with this community with receiving resources and education, because we can see the direct effects of that, and because that’s what the Promise [Neighborhood] is focused on, I thought, “Okay, this is somewhere for me to channel my efforts. This is where I can make the most impact on this initiative I care about.” And I had great support for that from UE.
What does STEMpire do?
We are a nonprofit that is designed to help get young girls into STEM. I know that’s a broad goal to establish, and I know there are a million other nonprofits that do the same thing. But here was the initial idea.
We wanted to make a conference, and initially, we weren’t going to file to be a nonprofit. It was going to be a one-time thing. But as the conference grew, we had to make it a nonprofit so that we wouldn’t be taxed on the income we were making, so that it didn’t look like we were doing anything shady.
I have attended conferences, and I’ll leave that conference feeling so inspired. But I don’t know what to do with that energy and motivation. I thought, “What if I make this an initiative because my friends are also interested in STEM? What if I make this something where we can serve as a board, where we can make fundraising events, where we can establish this conference to get our primary base and then help the community with their STEM initiatives?”
We can look for job opportunities. We can look for mentorships that we can offer to people who are interested in STEM. We wanted to help the community through volunteering. We did the Youth Resources Make a Difference grant, which we used to make science kit fundings for the Promise Neighborhood schools.
Our goal is to help girls get into STEM education and not just understand STEM better, but also believe that higher education is accessible, even if they come from a background such as being a woman or having a low socioeconomic status.
Tell me about the STEMpire Conference.
The conference is a two-day event, June 7 and 8, at the University of Evansville’s Eykamp Hall. They were so generous. Their DEI team rented it out to us for free. And that was before we even won Changemaker.
The first day is STEM, and we are doing labs. We are incorporating local businesses, and we’re branching out into Henderson, and we’re branching out into neighboring regions to have hands-on STEM demos. We’re having a panel of guest speakers. We’re trying to do the best we can to get girls to understand the opportunities that are not just local to Evansville but are available in general.
When I incorporated the Evansville Promise [Neighborhood] and started looking at its needs, I thought the barrier to higher education isn’t an issue that is exclusive to women. It’s more of a socioeconomic thing. And the majority of STEM degrees require some form of higher education. I thought we could make the second day of the conference dedicated to college counseling and information for financial aid, scholarships, those sorts of things.
We came up with a mentorship program where we’ll have professionals in STEM help with mentoring girls. We wanted this to be something where you feel like it’s career readiness, where you can have an internship, shadowing opportunity or a mentorship on your college application. Where you can understand the areas of work better, where we can get these girls to become not only professionals in STEM, but professionals in STEM that stay in the Evansville community.
Tell me about the STEMpire Task Force.
Earlier, I discussed the volunteering initiatives we want to do locally. We intend on building that through our STEMpire conference by getting this task force of young women to help not only build the community around them, but also build their own skills. It’s intended to be just as rewarding for them as it would be for people in the local community.
This task force is aimed at taking the load off of teachers and overworked college counselors and family members who don’t have experience with college. Where these girls can get this information from support within the community and feel more prepared to go into their lives and make the entire area more of a network.
There are a lot of resources to help young women. The barrier to getting those resources to the girls is … these girls don’t know where to go to get these resources, and the places giving these resources don’t know who to give them to. We want it to be the conduit through which that can occur.
What was the prize for winning the Changemaker Challenge?
The first-place prize was a full tuition scholarship to the University of Evansville.
What are your college plans?
I’m definitely applying to the University of Evansville, and as of right now, that is the place I’m considering most strongly. However, I am completely open to anything. I don’t want to limit myself. It’s like when someone goes into med school and they’re like, “I know that I want to be a podiatrist,” then you walk out of it, and you’re not doing that. I’m giving myself time to see. I don’t want to claim I know everything right now.