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Reach For The Stars STEM Festival

Reach For The Stars STEM Festival poster

REACH FOR THE STARS 2023 is COMING Sept 23, 2023!!

Sign up on the mailing list to get on our list for an invitation. Because we are not doing an event in school year 22-23, 9th grade girls will also be allowed to participate this fall.

 

Middle school girls: Join us for a fun day of exciting hands-on activities and meet some amazing role models!

Each girl (or group of girls) must have an adult chaperone - a teacher or a parent or designate. Each adult can bring up to 10 girls. Instead of choosing individual workshops, each girl (or group of girls) will choose an "interest track" and will get two hands-on workshops and a job panel discussion related to that track.

  • A: SPACE and ASTRONOMY
  • B: MEDICINE (including space medicine and Bioscience)
  • C: PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, EARTH SCIENCE or MATH
  • D: ENGINEERING and ROBOTICS


If you would like to be a presenter, volunteer, exhibitor or financial contributor, send an email to starfest@rice.edu. We are especially grateful to our financial sponsors. In 2022 our prime supporter was Cheniere, with additional major support from Rice University, Prof. Neal Lane, NASA and Discovery Dome. We would love more sponsors for 2023!


Below was our Schedule for 2022; 2023 will be similar.

Our Keynote speaker for 2023 has not yet been decided.

Reach For The Stars STEM Festival schedule(Note - we have not determined which interest track is red, blue, green or orange yet)


History of our Festivals

Since middle school is the age where girls typically lose interest in science, Sally Ride asked us to work with her to create festivals to excite and inspire them. The result was that in 2006, Rice University began hosting the annual Sally Ride Science Festival. Sally Ride herself was the first speaker and often hailed the Rice event as the largest and best attended of her festivals. Each annual Festival includes a street fair, an inspiring talk by a woman astronaut, and roughly thirty women-led science and engineering workshops (each student attends two).

Starting in 2016, the Festival was renamed the "Reach for the Stars! STEM Festival", and is sponsored by the Ride Family Foundation and Rice Space Institute, with major funding from Cheniere, plus many other donors.