travel

A STEM Gay Goes to Chicago

Pics from my trip to the KEEN Engineering Education & Research Workshop!

Group picture from the KEEN ERRS Workshop, July 2026.

Hello readers, today we have another "travel blog" style post in the "STEM Gay" series. I love writing these as a break from my super-serious political essays as it shows more of my human side. I joke sometimes that I'm "in my paranoid era" where I'm terrified of travel anywhere due to the ongoing attacks on trans people across the country, but having now written 6 of these posts, I am heartened to know that there are still plenty of places that I can not only exist as a trans person, but be welcomed as a more radical voice in the typically stagnant STEM world. There are tons of people who are hungry for change and I'm happy to help contribute to that change.

I went to Chicago last week on the dime of the Kern Foundation, specifically the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), who focuses on engineering education with a framework that they call the "entrepreneurial mindset" (EM). This does not mean they help students start businesses, rather that they partner with universities to promote what they've identified as "EM Habits" (Curiosity, Connections, Create Value) in engineering education. If that sounds like "take back your life" seminar capitalist girlboss whinging, don't worry, I'm skeptical too. I always come into these spaces with a Freire/hooks/Fanon "STEM has been inherently violent and we must change it to serve human and ecological needs" type mindset, which everyone there seemed relatively receptive of. I don't want to throw the weight of my brand behind this institution, but they did pay for my travel and registration to this workshop, so of course I'm appreciative.

The purpose of this particular workshop ("Engineering Education Research & Scholarship (EERS)") was to help participants develop a SoTL research project, something I have decent familiarity with but something for which I appreciated the time, space, and community of practice.

But before all that work stuff, I had one key mission in Chicago: the Pokémon Fossil Exhibit at the Field Museum.

The Field Museum is massive; I was there for over two hours and saw probably less than a quarter of it. I chose my exhibits well, though, starting with the Ancient Americas exhibit which now features pieces that reconcile with the violence that museums like the Field have contributed towards. Something like a third of the pieces in the exhibit have been repatriated to Indigenous peoples thanks to the 2024 strengthening of NAGPRA.

The Field also features SUE the T-Rex, who is a non-binary icon in their own right. In 1990, Susan Hendrickson discovered the largest, most complete T-rex fossil ever discovered, which ultimately was named Sue. Sometime in the 2010s, Sue had an official Twitter account which tweeted from the first person as Sue. Since we don't know if the real Sue was male or female, the account started tweeting that it preferred gender-neutral pronouns. To this day, the museum exhibit's text uses they/they pronouns or simply uses no pronouns for Sue (e.g., "Sue was discovered in 1990, then Sue was brought to this site..."). It was an honor to see them up close!

Here's something fascinating, too. Those who know me closely know that I work with injection molding in my work, so I was pleased to see these small machines around the Field that injection mold you a small dinosaur on the spot. I'll surely be taking this idea to my makerspace collaborators!

The Mold-A-Rama plastic injection molding machine, where for $5 you can get a small T-rex made on the spot.

The T-rex produced via injection molding.

And of course, the main event of the whole trip: the Pokémon Fossil Exhibit. The gimmick here is that it places mockups of fossils from the Pokémon games next to their real-world fossil inspirations, such as real ammonites next to Omanyte and Omastar.

An archeologist Pikachu riding an Aerodactyl.

Real ammonite fossils next to plastic renditions of Omanyte and Omastar.

One of the museum curators, Dr. Jingmai O'Connor, even got made into a Pokémon-style character. She is truly living my greatest dream.

Anyway, once my fossil Pokémon plushies were purchased, it was time to do "real" work. I donned my girlboss blazer and headed into the workshop. Building on my previous work as zines as educational tools, the study I developed over the course of the workshop (and am still developing) relates to zines as a means of increasing student sense of belonging. More on this as I continue to research the topic!

Workshop Day 2 look, my "Free Palestine" outfit.

I will mostly keep the contents of the workshop to myself, but here's something funny: One of our tasks was to summarize a chapter of a book on engineering education, ours on the idea of the hidden curriculum. There was a table in the chapter that I wanted to show, so I decided to tape my entire jailbroken Kindle to the wall. People got a kick out of it.

My workshop team's summary of a book chapter on Hidden Curriculum.

My workshop booklet with three zines, two made by students and one made by me. Find my zine on plastic pollution on my website.

Lastly, I of course had to indulge in Chicago deep dish pizza. I'm a bit of a pizza connoisseur, if you didn't know. I shared this with two friends from grad school who happened to be at the same workshop, which was a real treat.