The day camp was made possible as part of Stuart’s grant from the National Science Foundation. Stuart first connected with Wedler during the pandemic and invited him to give a talk for the chemistry department’s weekly seminar series in October 2021. The two stayed in touch and an opportunity arose to include a camp as part of the grant’s broader impacts for making lab research more accessible.
“Blind people are typically excluded from chemistry because it’s such a heavy visual science,” Stuart said. “I want them to know that where those doors have previously been closed, they can open them, they can go through them and they can be a part of it.”
Wedler said that as a high schooler, a NASA program working with blind and sighted scientists to build and launch a small rocket left a lasting impression on him. He hopes the same will be true for these students.
“I left that program saying, ‘All these people who’ve told me that I shouldn't study honors chemistry, that I shouldn’t go on to study chemistry in college are wrong. I’m going to do it,’” he said.
There are about 15 blind people with a Ph.D. in chemistry and Wedler is one of them.
“I want them to leave saying, ‘I can do whatever I want to do, no matter how visual society makes it seem,” he said.
Angelica, a student at the Washington State School for the Blind, said she loves science but often doesn’t get hands-on experiences in school like she did at the camp.
“I want to be a chemist now,” she shared during the group’s morning break while they were snacking on banana and butterscotch candies. “Learning about the physics and mechanics of actual chemistry and science has been pretty cool.”
Tori, another student from the Washington State School for the Blind, said she had been looking forward to the camp for weeks. She loves science because it requires both creativity and structure. Though she doesn’t have a sense of smell, her graduate assistant described the smell to her and she was able to feel the flask get warmer, then cooler as the chemical reaction completed.
Nicole Javaly, a Ph.D. student in Stuart’s lab, said the group was doing experiments that undergrads at PSU would do in a general chemistry lab and it got her thinking about what they could incorporate from the camp to make labs more accessible for visually impaired students.
“If you have a sighted assistant, it’s a very doable thing to do, which is exciting because that’s often not the assumption,” she said.
Wedler and Stuart said it will take both students being their own advocate about what they need and what works for them as well as building the infrastructure to better support students and instructors.
Stuart said if students walked away from the camp knowing that they can pursue a career in science, it was a success. And if they choose chemistry at PSU, all the better.