Pilgrim High School students took a trip up to Brown University for the university’s STEM Day on Tuesday.

The day, an annual event at Brown since 2017, included panels, workshops and discussions with scientists at the university in order to pique student interest in different fields under the STEM umbrella.

This year was the second time that Pilgrim students took part in STEM Day, according to science teacher Marissa Reynolds. Pilgrim was one of six high schools participating in the day’s festivities, and the only one from outside Providence. They were joined by Central High School, Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School, Times Squared STEM Academy, the Providence Career and Technical Academy and Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex, according to Brown media relations manager Lynda Curtis.

The students in attendance were largely made up of 11th-grade AP Chemistry students and ninth-grade biology students. Reynolds said that that was on purpose – largely to give students who haven’t been on college tours experience in a college environment.

“A lot of these kids haven’t really gotten to be on a college campus before,” Reynolds said. “So getting to go to an Ivy League school and see this should hopefully give them a little bit of insight into that, into their college and career decisions.”

Throughout the course of the morning, the students went through three half-hour courses delivered by Brown Ph.D students who volunteered to teach certain topics. The first focused on teaching the students about polymers, while the second was about the history and science of photography and how images are captured.

Cornelius Zmed, a freshman who’s in Reynolds’ honors biology class, said he wanted to check out STEM Day because he was interested in how science applied to everyday life.

“I’ve never been to Brown before, so I didn’t really know what to expect, but I’m liking it,” Zmed said. “Everything is interactive and genius and about learning … Seeing a lot of this stuff, everything about chemicals and how they’re reacting together, I’m really interested.”

Zmed said that he particularly liked learning about how different chemicals reacted together, which was a major focus of each of the day’s workshops.

Before finishing off the day with an introduction to Brown’s pre-college programs and lunch, Pilgrim students went to one more workshop, where Ph.D candidates Sam Renard and Hana Tabit helped them extract iron from different kinds of cereal to help them solve a forensic mystery.

Sharing the passions that have led them to becoming Ph.D students, Renard and Tabit said, was what motivated them to present at STEM Day.

“I really like sharing the spark of knowledge that excited me when I was really young and motivated me to study chemistry in the first place,” Tabit said. “Experiencing it – rather than seeing it on a piece of paper, because it’s so much more than that – shows students what they can do.”

The two gave the same presentation last year and decided to volunteer to present again to a new group of students. Renard said that seeing Pilgrim’s students understand complicated topics and engage with their experiments made all of their preparation for their presentations well worth it.

“That look of recognition – like when they see how much iron is specifically in their cereals – is really awesome,” Renard said. “It’s really easy to just go through life not thinking about the chemistry that’s happening. But I think that chemistry has enhanced a lot of my appreciation for the small things, like iron or even colors. It’s really cool to see that in these students.”