The Beginning

As college applicants, our image of a scientist or engineer is shaped by media consumption and little real world experience. We go into our undergraduate programs and research experiences certain that our peers are going to be reclusive, phlegmatic, and coldly analytical. Yet the STEM community is full of true scientific creatives who appreciate and pursue scientific research for the same reason—to create new knowledge, to uncover, explain, and share the beauty of the world.

When our founding editor discovered this community, she felt a little cheated that this reality had been kept from her for so long. She founded Composite to share with the world how creative and diverse those who pursue STEM fields are.

With the success of the first issue, we have continued to produce Composite with the aim of helping other students imagine themselves in the scientific careers that are done such a disservice by the way they are represented in the media and how they are presented to us by high school counselors.