The Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute,
or DEOMI, welcomed four graduate students and one recent high
school graduate to take part in this summer's Science,
Technology, Engineering and Math internship program.
Known by its acronym, STEM, the program was sponsored by the
Office of Naval Research and allowed the interns to
participate in a variety of important projects.
The objective of having the STEM
program here at DEOMI,
having inters work for us, is to one ultimately encourage them to
get excited about entering the STEM career fields.
Hopefully when they finish their degrees, they'll come back and
work for the Department of Defense in their respective
STEM-related career fields.
Here at DEOMI we hope to encourage that,
but also DEOMI does benefit from having the students here because
they work on projects that are valuable to the DEOMI mission.
My project was looking at the relationship between demographic
diversity and different outcomes within work units,
so things like group cohesions, sexual harassment,
bullying, discrimination.
So my project was about examining the best practices for
integrating AVATAR simulation training into EOA courses.
You know we have this excellent technology available to us and
the goal is to really understand how we can use that technology
to produce the best EOAs possible to go out to
the field, fleet and wing.
Basically my message was that it takes both the Command level
of leadership and immediate supervisors in order to make an
inclusive environment within a DoD unit.
I always had this desire to work with numbers all day,
but I also wanted to feel like those numbers mattered to
somebody somewhere and I think that doing this program
specifically under DEOMI's wing has been a really good
experience for me to tackle both things that I really enjoy.
I was tasked with creating some demonstrative harassment
training materials, so I was asked to create some scenarios
that could be used as later video training development.
We were actually able to develop one of the scenarios into an
actual video for the end project at the end of the summer.
I really appreciate being a part of such a very important mission
that they have going on to end and to address sexual
harassment and all other forms of harassment.
While the grad students worked with DEOMI's Research and
Development Directorate, one intern,
Joshua, a recent high school graduate,
was assigned to the Resource Management IT Department.
His project was to develop a digital application that could
call up specific maps of the DEOMI building
as well as updating them.
I learned a lot about I.T.
and computer science in general, because you can take classes on
many sorts of things and learn from textbooks and lectures but
to actually go to a workplace with these ideas that you have
been taught about so very much and actually see them in action;
see how they work and interact with them,
it teaches you so much more about this subject.
As in recent years, the DEOMI STEM program concluded with a
poster symposium, an opportunity for the interns to explain to an
actual audience just what it was they had been working on
throughout the summer.
The Poster Symposium was good.
I did a lot of talking.
I'm exhausted from it, but it was awesome.
It was cool to see the outpouring of people that came
in that were interested in the work that weíre doing.
It just felt really supported.
Like we were doing something important here.
For DEOMI Minute, I'm Rich Feagler