Announcing the 2022 EWCP Scholarship for Cultural Impact

[Nate_Laverdure]

EWCP is proud to offer our 2nd annual scholarship opportunity for FIRST participants.

The 2022 EWCP Scholarship for Cultural Impact is a one-time, $1000 scholarship open to high school or college applicants who have participated in FTC or FRC. These mentor-based youth STEM programs, when executed well, can create frameworks and build skillsets for addressing inequality and injustice. This scholarship will be awarded on the basis of a 400-500 word essay which answers the question:

Given what you have learned in your FIRST experience, how will you positively impact culture in your community?

EWCP will publish the scholarship winner’s essay here and on our website. Congratulations again to the winner of our 2021 EWCP Scholarship for Social Change, Maria I. Maria’s essay can be found here.

The deadline to apply for this scholarship is Monday, 21 March 2022. More information about the scholarship, including application instructions and judging criteria, can be found at ewcp.org/scholarship

About us
EWCP Inc. is a 501c3 public charity established in 2018. Our nonprofit mission is to develop the sustainability of competitive youth STEM teams and strengthen the diversity, robustness, and impact of the youth STEM education community through strategic advocacy, expert consensus-building, and technical leadership. EWCP welcomes tax-deductible donations in support of this scholarship via the PayPal Giving Fund.

[Nate_Laverdure]

< 4 weeks remaining until the application deadline for this scholarship opportunity!

[Nate_Laverdure]

2 weeks remaining.

[Nate_Laverdure]

1 day remaining!

[Nate_Laverdure]

EWCP is proud to announce the winner of our 2nd annual scholarship!

Kavish Saini, is a high school senior from FTC 7244 “Out of the Box Robotics” in Thorndale, PA. Kavish is planning to study Biomedical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.

EWCP believes that the competitive STEM experiences acquired in FIRST can equip students to address social inequities throughout their personal, academic, and professional journeys. We found Kavish’s winning essay to be a shining example of this, and we celebrate his plan to bring his unique passion and skills to the US biomedical device industry-- and healthcare at large.

From all of us at EWCP, we’d like to thank all the scholarship applicants for their time and thoughfulness which resulted in such insightful and inspiring essay submissions as we received this year.

Kavish's winning essay

It took a surprise visit to the ER to personally comprehend the failures of the American Health System. The receipt was chalked with unnecessary expenses, most of which were sparsely covered by our insurance. For the 37 million Americans living on a below-average income, such bills can be devastating to one’s savings. This overpriced health system has embedded itself into our culture, shaping our daily lives and even the way we take care of ourselves.

With the growing expenses on biomedical devices, I knew these technologies were one of the primary causes of medical costs—and it was something I had the skills to tackle. It was my internship at a prosthetics workshop that shocked me at how most of these artificial limbs cost more than my parent’s car. A large issue with current prosthetics was the 2-3 week timeframe required to create the limb, adding thousands to the already costly materials. By instead utilizing something more efficient such as 3D printing, these new technologies can be easily utilized to create more economical and personalized prosthetics.

My work at JaipurFoot, the world’s largest prosthetics non-profit, augmented my understanding of prosthetic manufacturing. Using the thermal properties of HDPE pipes allowed the organization to alter the standard manufacturing process into a substantially cheaper and quicker technique. Such ingenuity inspires me to design a 3D-printed partial hand prosthetic for a commonly seen patient injury. The experience I have gained developing a currently patented product with nth Solutions allowed me to pick material and construction techniques while considering the cost and ease of assembly.

I hope to take my initial knowledge gained to continue to develop patient-specific printed prosthetic limbs. With over 30 million citizens around the globe in need of a prosthetic device, this plan is scalable to any level, with these 3D printed limbs already working in a non-profit setting. While more work needs to be done in the material research department, the designs I’m working on are proven to work. Most innovatively, they are adjustable, meaning that no tedious custom creations are needed for each patient.

I wasn’t able to understand many of these concepts on my own, but instead had the opportunity to learn through failure with my FIRST robotics team. It was here that I was tasked with budgetary and material restrictions in the robot design, mimicking the real-life challenges I currently face with prosthetic design. It took us several seasons and tens of broken servos to learn that sometimes expensive isn’t better, but a cheaper yet clever design can solve several problems at once. These roadblocks taught me to be creative, and find alternative solutions to the standards. In fact, it was through an FTC outreach event that I discovered the field of prosthetics!

I know that my FIRST education has led me to pursue an interest in biomedical engineering, where I’ll continue to produce low-cost biomedical devices to shake up the healthcare status quo to create a more health-forward society.

[Karthik]

This is one of my favourite FIRST scholarships. Thanks to all who’ve put this together and for sharing the incredibly inspiring winning essays. And of course, congratulations to a deserving winner!

[Katie_UPS]

A report on the judging process used for the 2022 EWCP Scholarship for Cultural Impact:

Background
The EWCP Scholarship for Cultural Impact is a small FIRST scholarship established in 2020 by EWCP, Inc, a nonprofit with the mission of strengthening the diversity, robustness, and impact of youth STEM education through strategic advocacy, expert consensus-building, and technical leadership.
As part of that mission, and to provide a resource for similar community scholarships, we wish to publish some notes on the judging process used to determine the 2022 award winner. We recommend this judging strategy for scholarship programs of similar size.

Anonymization phase
After the essay submission deadline, a group of anonymizers removed identifying information including names, locations, institutions, and specific youth STEM competitions from all essays. Essays were assigned a unique identification number before being sent to the judges to ensure we removed as much potential bias as possible.

Round 1 judging
Essays went through two rounds of judging. The first round of judging saw every essay read by two judges and evaluated using this rubric:
Use the following convention for each criteria:
0 - Does not satisfy this requirement
1 - Somewhat satisfies requirement
2 - Meets requirement
3 - exceeds requirement

Criteria:
Effort: Student has clearly put effort into their essay
Plan - Clearly Communicated: Essay explains the mechanism by which the plan provides a solution to the problem statement
Plan - Demonstrates Thoughtful Understanding: Essay demonstrates empathetic thinking and thoughtful understanding of the problem statement, problem statement is relevant
Plan - Achievable/Actionable: Essay demonstrates that plan is achievable and has actionable items
Plan - Scale: This plan has a significant impact as measured by population size, duration of effect, and/or magnitude of effect
Connected/tied back to FIRST Experience: Essay links to ideas and concepts from FIRST experience
Originality: Essay and plan demonstrate original thinking
Round 1 scores were computed for each essay by adding the scores for each rubric category given by both judges who reviewed that essay.

Downselection for round 2
The essays were sorted by total score. Scholarship administrators selected a position in the ordered list where there was a conspicuously large gap in score between neighboring essays. In the case of the 2022 scholarship, there was a large gap between the 3rd and 4th essays in the sorted list. The 3 top essays were then sent forward to a second round of judging.

Round 2 judging
Next, every judge was asked to read all top essays and identify their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place choices. A weight was assigned to each of these three ranks, and the overall winner was the essay with the highest weighted sum.

Deanonymization and winner notification
Having identified the winning essay, the scholarship administrators asked the anonymization team to reveal the author.