About Girls in STEMpreneurship

As I run around the office premises with my stuffed Río in hand, I occasionally peek into my mother’s laptop, spotting confusing graphs and pie charts. As I pester her with questions, I learn that these numbers shape how companies manage risk and make decisions. Intrigued, I ask how firms protect themselves when buyers do not pay, how claims are settled, and how uncertainty affects profit. The more time I spend listening, the more fascinated I become with how business works beneath the surface.

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Years later, that curiosity followed me into my internship at MatchNice, where I saw those same questions play out in a different setting. MatchNice operates at the intersection of nonprofits and donors, and early on, I noticed a tension the team struggled with: how to grow impact without losing efficiency. Donations were increasing, but it was unclear which outreach strategies actually converted interest into sustained giving.

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As a Finance Intern, I worked directly with donation data and financial statements, building financial modules to compare engagement channels, retention rates, and cost per donor. The challenge was that the data was incomplete and messy. Nonprofits did not behave like traditional customers, and intuition often conflicted with the numbers. Instead of forcing standard conclusions, I learned to ask better questions: which metrics mattered for the mission, not just revenue? Where did scaling help, and where did it dilute impact?

By analyzing patterns across campaigns, I helped surface insights about which acquisition strategies led to repeat donations rather than one-time clicks. That experience taught me how finance operates differently when success is measured by outcomes, not profit alone. At MatchNice, I learned to treat data as a decision-making tool rather than an answer, a mindset I now carry into every business, research, and product decision I make.

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Working at MatchNice showed me how often organizations struggle not because of bad intentions, but because they lack practical frameworks for making decisions under uncertainty. I kept thinking about how much earlier this kind of thinking could be introduced. Concepts like risk transfer, insurance, and supply chain resilience, which my parents worked with every day, were barely discussed in student spaces. Even motivated peers could model returns, but few understood how companies actually survive uncertainty. That gap became the foundation for co-founding Prudence Insurance & Risk Management Business School.

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At Prudence, I designed applied modules centered on real business scenarios rather than theory. Launching it was not straightforward. Schools hesitated because it didn’t fit traditional frameworks. After months of limited traction, I shifted toward international partnerships, working with organizations like the International Chamber of Commerce and SCLG. That decision brought the program to hundreds of participants across regions and eventually enabled its return to the U.S. What began as childhood questions became a platform for practical financial education built around how businesses actually manage risk.

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Building Prudence changed how I thought about learning. I realized that understanding concepts was not enough. People learn most when they are required to apply ideas, defend decisions, and navigate trade-offs. That realization pushed me to expand my work through TeenvestNow! and SAEBE, where I helped design global curricula and competitions that brought together students from multiple countries. In those spaces, students were not memorizing frameworks. They were using them, under constraints, in real time.

Through this work, I began to notice a pattern I couldn’t ignore.

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When I was teaching calculus and economics, I saw students solve problems quickly, sometimes faster than I expected. But when I asked them to explain their thinking out loud, they hesitated. It wasn’t a lack of understanding. It was a lack of confidence in owning their reasoning.

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Over time, something else became even more clear. As students got older, many of the girls who were just as sharp, just as capable, started to pull back from these fields. The shift wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet. Fewer hands raised. Less willingness to speak. More hesitation to pursue advanced paths. And it didn’t match what I had seen in their work. The gap was never ability. I had seen their thinking up close. It came down to something else. They hadn’t seen enough people who looked like them building in these spaces. They hadn’t been shown, clearly and concretely, what this path could become. Without that visibility, the connection between what they were learning and who they could be started to fade.

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At the same time, my own work looked very different. I was building HireOwl, working through financial models, publishing research on global energy markets, and teaching risk and supply chain concepts to professionals. None of it felt like isolated subjects. It felt like making decisions under uncertainty, understanding systems, and applying ideas in environments where outcomes actually mattered.

 

That contrast stayed with me. Inside the classroom, STEM was structured, segmented, and often abstract. Outside of it, it was fluid, interconnected, and deeply tied to real decisions. But more importantly, I realized that even when these connections exist, they are not always shown in a way that makes girls feel like they belong in them. I kept coming back to the same question: what if that visibility existed earlier? What if girls didn’t have to wait to see where they fit into these spaces, or whether they fit at all?

 

That question became Girls in STEMpreneurship.

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In many ways, it felt like a continuation of everything I had already been doing. Through Prudence, I had worked on making complex systems understandable. Through TeenvestNow! and SAEBE, I had built environments where students applied ideas under real constraints. Through teaching, I had seen where confidence and connection began to break down.

Girls in STEMpreneurship brought those threads together with a specific focus: making sure girls could see themselves in the work, early and clearly.

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As part of my Girl Scout Gold Award, I designed this initiative to bridge the gap between technical learning and real-world application through a lens that prioritizes visibility and representation. Through workshops, podcasts like The Business Beat, and conversations with founders and industry professionals, students explore how STEM connects to business, finance, and entrepreneurship in practice. They analyze real problems, make decisions, and engage directly with how these fields operate. More importantly, they see women doing this work. They hear how paths are built, how decisions are made, and how uncertainty is navigated. That visibility changes how the work feels. It becomes something they can step into, not something they observe from a distance.

 

Looking back, this wasn’t one decision. It was a pattern I had been noticing for years, across classrooms, organizations, and my own experiences.

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Girls in STEMpreneurship is my response to that pattern at a larger scale. Because the gap was never ability. It was whether students, especially girls, were given the chance to see what their knowledge could actually become.