DEI Dispatch - Scientist Spotlight
Annaul Plant Discovery Day is Back!
Author: Tyler Inskeep
March 8, 2023
Saturday, May 11th, 2023 (9:30am-1:30pm), will mark the return of Plant Discovery Day after its hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We reached out to Elizabeth Hann, Alex White, and Annalise Kane, who have contributed to planning past and present events to learn more about Plant Discovery Day.
What is Plant Discovery Day?
Plant Discovery Day is an annual event where the graduate students of UCR’s Botany and Plant Sciences Department host over 100 5th grade students from a local elementary school. Plant Discovery Day typically hosts roughly a dozen booths, many sponsored by labs in the department. These booths provide interactive, hands-on learning experiences pertaining to plant science, and more broadly how food gets from the farm to the table. This year, we will have several outreach and take-home materials. This includes foldscopes for each student that can be utilized in multiple demonstrations and taken home.
This event gives graduate students the opportunity to connect with and give back to our community and practice communicating science. Plant Discovery day is beloved by our department, the elementary school teachers, and the 5th graders. One even wrote “learned more here than at school” on their post-participating survey in 2018.
What is the history of Plant Discovery Day? Why and when did it start?
Plant Discovery Day was established in 2012 by two previous graduate students, Jessica Diaz and Erin Brinton as a part of their NSF-PGRP fellowships. They wanted to give graduate students and postdocs a way to participate in outreach and provide young students with the chance to learn about plant biology. Maybe even more importantly, they wanted to introduce the students of a nearby school to a college campus and share information and inspiration about what pursuing higher education could look like for their future.
What have we seen at previous Plant Discovery Days and what can we expect this year?
Plant Discovery Day is really fun, high energy, and exhausting - we are wrangling 5th grade students for a full day! It is a really fulfilling experience. In previous years, students got to extract DNA from a strawberry, touch bugs, look at cells under a microscope, learn about college and fruits and so much more. This year, we will definitely help the students explore microscopy, floral dyeing, herbarium press assembly, DNA extraction, and potentially even preparing native seed bombs!
Since it has been years since Plant Discovery Day was last hosted, many of the graduate students participating have never attended this event! This is a great opportunity to innovate and put on an event with completely fresh eyes.
How can I get involved in Plant Discovery Day?
Plant Discovery Day is a department-wide event so you should absolutely get involved! As a bonus- this is a great way to get to know other people in the department better. Luckily, there are lots of ways to help out. You can help with organizing and planning the event (this requires time and effort leading up to the event, but a big reward to get a say in how the day happens), volunteer to put on a booth (which can be done independently, opportunity to be creative), volunteer to help with a booth (this could be day of or leading up to the event), or just volunteer to help out on the day of with setup, cleanup, etc. (this requires the least amount of time and effort, but is really important and rewarding).
If you are interested in participating in Plant Discovery Day, please fill out this form!
