Written By Allyson Edwards Hawkins High School, Hawkins Texas
When signing up for the GLOBE science club at my school, little did I realize the impact that it would have on my life. Our original team, comprised of just three eighth grade girls would one day develop into an international collaboration among students in three different countries. It wasn’t always easy but it my entire worldview was changed by being apart of GLOBE. For our story, it began with us meeting face to face at a science conference while each school was working on separate projects. We formed friendships first and then decided to attempt to work together on a single research project that would span the globe. There were lots of bumps along the way, but the biggest issue we came across were the time zones. If we wanted to video chat (which was always our favorite form of communication because it allowed us to have the closest thing to real in person interaction with each other) one of the schools would have to call late at night while the others would early in the morning their time. Emails, texts and phone calls also helped our project to succeed. Every second was worth it. I learned more from being apart of that project than I did from volleyball, cheerleading, or theatre which were three of the things I loved most in high school. Because of our collaboration, I realize that science is something that can connect anyone. Even students from our school that joined the project after we went to the original science conference that had connected our schools and had never met any of the kids from India or Croatia, were just as excited about being apart of the project and forming relationships. Science was the start of a friendship for them and I cannot thank the GLOBE Program enough for fostering that.
