Brown doctoral candidate launches career-mentoring startup

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Lindsay Kuhn has a passion for learning, and for doing, and it shows in her latest project.

Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, a little help from Brown University’s startup accelerator program, and a team Kuhn put together to help with her startup’s website, Inventing Heron came to fruition this past March. 

Inventing Heron (http://inventingheron.com) aims to motivate students who don’t believe they can excel in science and math, or who just need a little extra motivation to learn in general, Kuhn says.

“I just think it’s accessible to everyone,” she says of the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math. “You just have to be interested enough to learn.”

Kuhn, who attends services at Congregation Beth Sholom, in Providence, has an unquenchable thirst for learning. After high school, she enrolled in a joint degree program at Columbia University that resulted in a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia and a bachelor of arts in English from Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College.

After college, and a move to California, Kuhn spent a year writing for both E Entertainment and the Malibu Times. She then turned to the other half of her degree and worked for six years for Boeing, where she monitored satellites, as well as designing them. 

In 2010, Kuhn moved back east to work on a doctorate in material sciences at Brown. While she enjoyed mechanical engineering, she says she “wanted to do something she felt more of a personal connection to.”

As part of her doctoral program, she taught seventh-grade science at Nathan Bishop Middle School, in Providence, where she found that a lot of the students could have used a little extra motivation. This in turn served as her motivation for starting Inventing Heron – to help motivate students.

“I think people are scared off by reasons that have nothing to do with their abilities. I really think to be good in math and science, it just takes patience and hard work,” she says.

Inventing Heron, Kuhn explains, aims to serve as a kind of link between career mentors and young adults  – “more human than LinkedIn” – and will soon allow employers to look for the young users, who are called “herons.”  

Currently, Inventing Heron is targeting high school students and up, and is piloting a student-led career fair at North Smithfield High School. To prepare for this, students will study different careers through Inventing Heron and then present information about their fields of study to other students at the fair. The curriculum leading up to the fair is 12 weeks long and takes place during the students’ advisory periods.

Kuhn is also meeting with local and state employees, including people from the mayor of Providence’s office and the Rhode Island governor’s office, to further develop the program. Working with the former to engage employers and mentors in Inventing Heron, and the latter to develop outreach programs to prepare Rhode Island’s students for the real world, the ultimate goal is to inspire students to “take school more seriously.”

 “If you could nurture their career aspirations and tell them why they’re learning certain things, it could help to motivate them,” says Kuhn.

ARIEL BROTHMAN is a freelance writer who lives in Wrentham, Massachusetts.