Local News Network caught up with Trang Pham, the program manager for Pinhead Institute, to talk about their STEM education, camps, workshops, internships, and their biggest fundraiser of the year, The Science of Cocktails, which is coming up on July 8.
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Transcript
– My name is Trang Pham and I am the program manager at Pinhead Institute. Pinhead Institute is a STEM non-profit. We service quite a variety of different areas around here. We’re based in Telluride, but we actually go about an hour and a half radius from Telluride. And the reason why it’s actually really important for us to have STEM education access in our rural southwestern Colorado is we’re not really located near any big universities. We don’t really have a lot of opportunities for students to go and explore more and do their interests. And so Pinhead Institute actually comes in, we get to actually be the really cool Bill Nye The Science Guy people, we get to make science education fun. And so kids can come and do all sorts of different programming with us. And the kind of programs that we do is we have afterschool classes, we have summer camps, which is full on right now. We also do all sorts of different scientist talks. We bring scientists into the school for “Scholars in the Schools.” And we also do Punk Science Talks during the summer as well. And then we do, our biggest program is actually the Pinhead internship, which is for juniors who apply. And once they get in, they actually get matched with a lab in a field that’s similar to what their interests are, and they actually go off and do summer research between their junior and their senior year for anywhere between three to eight weeks. These internships are actually really life-changing for some of our students. And in order to do all of this, we need to make sure that we have funding to help make all of these programs happen. And we rely a whole lot on our private donors. Our annual fundraiser is the Science of Cocktails, which is gonna be on July 8th from 5:00 to 8:00, and it’s at the Telluride Science and Innovation Center. And right now we have seven different mixologists who are going to showcase their best cocktails, and the cocktails actually have to have a scientific story behind that, but also taste good. Tickets are only $100 for the Science of Cocktails, which includes all of those cocktails. We also do have mocktails in case you don’t want to drink, that’s totally fine, where there’s small bites as well. And the money that is raised at this fundraiser is actually going straight to programming all of our STEM programs around this region. We’re really happy to be able to be a part of the Telluride community and to serve the community here. It’s only been three years since I’ve worked here, but I’ve already seen amazing things with the kids I’ve gotten to interact with. And I know that in the last 25 years we’ve had a lot of really wonderful interactions with our students as well.
