The Intrepid Museum’s GOALS (Greater Opportunities Advancing Leadership and Science) for Girls is an innovative program that aims to increase the presence of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). We provide 50 girls in eighth or ninth grade with the opportunity to expand their STEM thinking and skills during the GOALS for Girls Summer Intensive. For six weeks, students engage in hands-on experiences, world-expanding field trips and conversations with influential women who work in STEM careers. This year, the Summer Intensive’s biweekly themes were aviation and space science, marine and earth science, and technology and engineering.

There is no typical day in the Summer Intensive. GOALS staff, Museum educators and guest scientists all contribute activities that allow girls to explore STEM concepts. This summer, the girls curated their own exhibitions using pictures of real artifacts from Intrepid’s history, demonstrated the forces of flight with paper airplanes and drew mathematical elliptical orbits for imagined planets. They dissected a sheep brain with representatives from the New York Hall of Science and traveled to Rockefeller University where they extracted, amplified and visualized their own DNA. The girls sailed on the schooner Pioneer at the South Street Seaport Museum and learned how to trawl for estuarine life, raise and lower the sails and triangulate their location using local landmarks on a navigation chart. They participated in workshops and tours led by student representatives from Columbia University’s astrophysics and engineering labs. The girls networked with women currently working in STEM fields, and they met and spoke with the architects of the NASA Orbit Pavilion, now on display on the Intrepid Museum’s pier. They listened to guest lectures by a nutritionist, a GOALS alum from Stuyvesant High School now interning at the Museum, and enthusiastic representatives from the Waterkeeper Alliance and Billion Oyster Project.

Girls also attended two Youth Leadership Conferences. At the conferences, influential women in space, marine, earth and environmental sciences or in aviation were invited to mentor the girls for a day. Girls discussed their education prospects, career goals and inspirations with their mentors.  

In the sciences, teamwork and leadership are absolutely essential, so GOALS for Girls creates experiences to foster such skills. At the start of the Summer Intensive, the girls and staff tested their grit by rock climbing and rappelling off a 60-foot wall. They participated in icebreakers to learn more about one another and about the value of diverse ideas and strategies. The girls also created their own personal vision boards—visual representations of themselves as they are now, who they aspire to become and what makes them unique. The culminating projects will require the girls to prioritize, delegate and problem-solve as a unit.

The GOALS for Girls Summer Intensive ended last week with an open house, a talent show and a much-anticipated sleepover on the hangar deck of Intrepid—the perfect end to a summer filled with many exciting, demanding and ambitious experiences!

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