CuSTEMized: Personalized Storybooks Inspire the Next Generation of Female Scientists

Through storybooks that can be personalized for names and appearances, CuSTEMized helps little girls walk in the shoes of those in STEM careers.

Image credit:Jean Fan

As a graduate student in the bioinformatics and integrative genomics program at Harvard University, Jean Fan was the only woman in her cohort. Hoping to interact with more women in the university, she became the co-chair of the Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering student group.

Through this organization, she volunteered in a program to mentor young girls after school. “I taught these second graders about flight and sound, body maps, [in a] fun introduction to science,” recalled Fan, now a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University.

At the end of the school year, Fan wished to give her young students a parting gift. “[I wanted] to…give them a sense that I believed in them, that I think they can be anything they want to be,” she said. So, she manually created personalized picture books for each of her students. “And they all really loved it,” recalled Fan.

Their enthusiastic response got Fan thinking about using her computational skills to scale up the product such that anyone could make a personalized storybook for their children.

Building on this idea, Fan established a non-profit venture called CuSTEMized, which provides personalized books—called Your Little Book of Big Dreams and Your Scientific Name—to young girls and children, depicting them in STEM fields. The books encourage young girls to envision themselves pursuing STEM careers, thus inspiring the next generation of scientists through storytelling.

“It’s important to encourage our young girls and children in general to have this vision for themselves as being anything,” said Fan. “I think it’s important to have a self-narrative and to have a sense of, ‘You can accomplish things.’”

The colorful book, Your Scientific Name, shows the scientific careers that the letters in a name represent. Users can personalize the child’s name and appearance to generate an eBook, which they can download for free. Your Little Book of Big Dreams tells the story of a young child, whose name and looks can be customized, in the shoes of various professionals ranging from a biologist and meteorologist to an astronaut and agronomist. In addition to free eBooks, customers in the US can buy a hard copy of the book.

Other than showcasing potential careers, the books also emphasize that these paths may not always be easy. “[This teaches] our children to be aware and anticipatory of these hardships but then to be resilient, to know that it’s anticipated [and] expected, but [they] can make it through,” explained Fan.

Looking back, letting people input a name to be the hero of the book was an obvious decision. “You can admire somebody, but there’s always a sense that, ‘Maybe she’s exceptional. She’s not me,’” said Fan. “My hope was that it encourages young girls to see themselves as scientists.”