Bronx Science students lead community activism with initiatives for accessibility and tech education

Knowing that everything that I’m doing is contributing to something bigger than just myself – I want to inspire other people in doing the things that I have been inspired to do.”

Sarah Lin, Bronx Science senior

Students at Bronx High School of Science are paving the way for community activism. 

Bronx Science senior, Sarah Lin, has been a girl scout for 13 years. And on Oct. 30, she was honored by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York as their 2024 Future Woman of Distinction, for her work with the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. 

Lin was raised in Queens by her mother who has severe progressive hearing loss, which according to data from the Hearing Loss Association, 48 million Americans experience as well.  

“I was able to see firsthand how challenging it was for her to access things that many of us take for granted, like going to the movies,” Lin said. 

This experience opened her eyes to the connection between accessibility and entertainment, and she launched a project to make a trip to the movies more inclusive. Lin’s initiative, Theaters Unsilenced, began in 2023 as a push to include closed captions on screens of major movie theaters. It also includes educating theater staff on effective communication with patrons who are deaf or hard of hearing, like teaching employees to make direct eye contact and emphasizing lip movement while speaking to allow for more effective lip reading. 

“I also developed a daily checklist for staff to verify the working conditions of hearing assistive and closed captioning devices,” Lin said. 

For the past two summers, Lin worked eight-week sessions, five days a week at Columbia University’s Institute for Cancer Genetics lab conducting pancreatic cancer research. 

“I knew I wanted to research cancer just because of all the family members I’ve had that have been lost to [it],” Lin said. 

Beyond her work with the deaf and hard-of-hearing community and Columbia’s cancer lab, Lin is co-president of her school’s pre-medical society, founder and president of her school’s hair care society, senior council video director and a Bronx Science Big Sib, a program at her high school giving her the opportunity to mentor and welcome an incoming ninth grader. 

“I think it’s important to realize that you have to be flexible with your commitments and I’ve just learned that being organized and being adaptable is key and things don’t always go as planned,” Lin said. 

When Lin graduates, she hopes to study science and pursue a career as a physician. 

She added that she is often inspired by the people and mentors in her life, but her biggest inspiration is her mother. 

“Knowing that everything that I’m doing is contributing to something bigger than just myself. . . I want to inspire other people in doing the things that I have been inspired to do,” Lin said. 

A grade down from Lin, a junior at Bronx Science, is Evan Yang, co-founder of Code4NYC, an organization run by Yang and fellow students, Gregory Wolf, Evonne Chen and Hanim Noor. 

Yang learned Python, a coding language, at an introductory course he took at Hunter College this past summer, which initiated his passion for coding. He believed that his ability to learn code was an educational advantage given the lack of computer science programming available to middle and high school students across the country. 

“I realized that there was a lack of resources when it came to programming because many schools throughout the city don’t really teach it,” Yang said. 

Yang co-founded the free virtual programming education to teach middle school students across the city how to code, no matter their socioeconomic status. 

A 2020 report by the National Science Foundation wrote, “too often learners’ zip codes and income levels are the determining factor for the quality of their STEM [science, technology, engineering, math] education and the future of the learner.” 

Yang was drawn to programming because of its combination of logic and automation. For him, computer science allows society to address issues with innovation and creativity. 

“Especially in today’s world, it has become increasingly important to recognize how integrating a technological component into our daily lives can add a creative and efficient touch to our day-to-day lives,” Yang said. 

Everything from smartphones, online banking and electric vehicles were made possible with the technology of computer science. 

In his pursuit to address the knowledge gap, he and his co-founders chose to teach middle schoolers because they believed giving younger students a chance to pursue programming could help them pursue their interests earlier. 

Each of the participating high school students are assigned four to five students per virtual tutoring session. Yang and his partners find their participants by emailing schools across the city and asking educators to share their services. 

Next for Yang, he plans to expand the organization, reaching out to more schools in the South Bronx.

“I wanted to make a tangible change even if it’s at the local level,” Yang said.