Hi all, just a question about the broader impacts criteria. I think my research in itself has very clear broader impacts on society at large, and I can definitely relate my personal experiences to why I want to carry out research in this field.
On the other hand, I feel like my outreach activities are lacking. I've done STEM mentoring for fellow college students (holding office hours, meeting 1 on 1 with students to help them, etc.), but it seems everyone keeps talking about mentoring and outreach with respect to underrepresented minorities, which is definitely lacking on my resume. I volunteered as a tour guide and specifically gave tours to underprivileged students (aside from giving the a tour of the campus, sat on a Q&A panel about college life, encouraged the kids to get a college education, etc.), but it had nothing to do with STEM.
But I think my application shows that I am definitely committed to making my field accessible to those outside of it. My biggest achievement is authoring a tutorial on computational methods in my field (I'm a computational math and mech eng. major) that is focused solely towards scientists and engineers that have no prior knowledge in this field. One of the areas I've seen fellow classmates struggle immensely with is in the computational math courses required by all of the depts of engineering at my school. I've been getting feedback from many of my professors and classmates in writing it and it will be well over 100 pages in its final draft and includes codes and theory that will (I hope) help transition from theory to application. I've spent the past year working on this (it's not a thesis, just a personal project). Do you all think this would be suitable for the BI category? Trying my best to get involved in some meaningful outreach activities this summer as I'll be working on some interesting stuff with a national lab that frequently has outreach days for local schools