Dhruv Kothari grew up visiting Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland to learn about astronomy. Now a 12th grader, he is the one explaining the science.
Kothari, who attends Emerald High School in Dublin, is an intern in Chabot’s Galaxy Explorers Program, which brings more than 200 high school students a year to the museum to teach visitors about science and space while building skills for careers in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM. On weekends, the students help children launch paper rockets, run live science demonstrations and explain exhibits, much like museum docents.
“Since I was a kid, I really liked space, and one of my favorite places to come to was Chabot,” Kothari said. “I was just searching online for volunteer opportunities, and I found Chabot, so I applied here and got in.”
Tyler Novet, Chabot’s Oakland Space Academy project manager, oversees the Galaxy Explorers Program. The academy is Chabot’s workforce development program for high school students and adults interested in the space industry, and Galaxy Explorers is its first step. According to Chabot’s website, students typically join the summer before 10th grade and stay through 12th grade.
“The Galaxy Explorers Program is all focused on workforce development, arming our students with pathways for their career skills, things that will open doors for them,” Novet said.
Those doors include college, technical and trade schools, and jobs.
“I revamped the program from its focus in volunteering and STEM enrichment into a workforce development academy,” Novet said. “We really measure and track and develop and train in those workforce skills.”
Novet said he wants students to treat the center as a workplace. Galaxy Explorers fill two floor shifts a month during the school year and three a month in the summer. Each shift starts with training on a job or technical skill and ends with a group debrief. In between, students head to the museum floor, where some lead activities from demonstration kits, which Novet described as prepackaged science concepts.
“Some will facilitate exhibits that we have standing all the time,” Novet said. “Some will do crafts, all kinds of activities like that. They engage with visitors, whoever comes by, adapting to whatever audience we have for that day.”
Saahith Muppana, an 11th grader at Foothill High School in Pleasanton, recently worked two floor shifts in one day, running a vacuum chamber demonstration in the morning and leading a bubbles demonstration after lunch.
“You use simple demonstrations to provide a much bigger picture of how stuff works outside of Chabot,” Muppana said.
Much of that work centers on space. Galaxy Explorer mentor Shinoi Patil is an 11th grader at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton. He said students often run rockets in the morning, when the museum is slow, helping visitors launch them outside and explaining the physics behind them. Program participants also teach topics such as aerodynamics, solar physics and meteorite identification.
Some of that teaching happens after dark. The SETI Institute in Mountain View, a nonprofit research organization that studies the origins of life, donated telescopes to the program that Galaxy Explorers have used to show visitors images of deep space objects during Chabot’s public viewing nights.
Other stations are more hands-on. Patil spent one afternoon in Lab 1, where a lamp giving off a single wavelength of light turns the darkened room one color while children try to color pictures correctly.
This story originally appeared in CCSpin.
Chabot Space & Science’s Galaxy Explorers Program
How to apply
Applications are open Feb. 1 to March 31. Applicants go through a review and attend an information session with their families in April. Admission decisions are made in early May, and orientation is in early to mid-June. Questions can be sent to GalaxyExplorers@ChabotSpace.org.