The STEMinist Chronicles

The STEMinist Chronicles is an organization focused on exploring the intersection of gender and STEM. Namrata Ramesh started the student group at UC Berkeley in spring 2018 after creating a photoessay highlighting the gender disparity in our physics department. I joined the following fall when Namrata began recruiting. Originally, I intended to come on solely as a photographer. However, seeing as we only had a handful of people at the time, I quickly took on several new roles: interviewer and web designer.

Coming from no formal experience with interviewing or any sort of journalism, I found the process fascinating. I am a naturally curious person, and I loved being able to learn about other people’s experiences and journeys. Equally intriguing was how much I resonated with their stories. They talked about issues I was familiar with but had never put into words and issues that I had not personally faced but had seen in others around me. Then, being able to take those words and uncover the narrative was its own unique and fulfilling experience.

The two published photoessays I interviewed, photographed, and edited can be found here: Jessica Avva and Aashrita Mangu — as well as my own photoessay, interviewed by Julie Lai, shot by Eden McEwen, and edited by me.

After we published our first photoessay, I volunteered to design us a new website. Our initial website was an amalgam of templates and generic elements that did not properly portray the content we were creating. Both Namrata and I felt that the site should be a platform to uplift the stories we were telling and provide space for both the photos and text to be acknowledged. We brainstormed different formats to display our work and various elements we wanted to incorporate. We did not yet have a brand “image” — so there was a lot of creative space to cover — but I decided on a modern, minimal theme and began to work within that framework. For more information on web design and branding, see my creative process below!