“Wow, we have touched about 400 to 500 kids because they got to [learn] from a professional,” Jeff Bivin, division head of mathematics, said. “[From the event] students now can say, ‘Oh that’s something I want to do.’ Or maybe, ‘I thought it would like that career, but that’s not me.’ They now can make those career, not decisions, but idea formulations.”

In honor of Pi, on Monday, March 14, the school held a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) event. Alumni and other professionals visited the school and talked about their careers in the STEM fields.

“I think one of things we wanted to do was celebrate pi. We thought, ‘Okay, how do we go about doing that?’ Then we thought doing a STEM event. We weren’t quite sure at first, what it would entail, but we wanted to do an event that would promote the careers,” Brian Agustin, division head of science, said.

Some career options that the students were able to explore included chemistry, system technologies, architecture, engineering, environmental, medical physics and vision specialty, and processing of technologies.

“It’s going to a broader range than what I thought it would. On the faculty side, we see this as a math, science thing,” said Bivin. “But we saw a lot of people [interested in] English, History, Art, and their reactions have been ‘Oh, wow, this was really good.”

Students came during periods four through seven to listen to professionals’ presentation and received free pizza.

“We had a lot of students who did not sign up, who wanted to come in after the fact. That in itself, means success,” Agustin said. “Some of the students that came 4th, 5th period, wanted to come back 6th and 7th period because they wanted study hall. “

The math and science department were not expecting such successful results. But they did want the departments to discuss how they could attract more student participation.

“We know of other schools that have done the STEM event too. We wanted to know how we could make it different from everybody else and Lake Zurich’s own. Tagging it on with the pizza pi, making it fun a little bit,” Bivin said. “We were kind of hoping outside to have 300 students. We have had probably a little more over 400, 450. A couple classes came in as a whole class, that we were not anticipating.”