FULL STEAM AHEAD

Add arts to the science mix of STEM for an enriched, integrated degree

IGH-school guidance counselors have been preaching the gospel of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education for years, promising that it will raise your odds of future employability, earning a fat paycheck, saving the planet and then some.

But it turns out that STEM gets even sexier if you add an “A” — which stands for Arts — to the acronym. That’s right; a STEAM education is the new educational pièce de résistance.

“Creative and design-thinking are key if you want to succeed in the 21st century,” says Debbi Honorof, senior director of marketing and communications at Hofstra University, noting that scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians will cut themselves short, plus their employers and maybe even society, if they work in silos.

“The 4 C’s — collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity — are crucial to the workplace of the future,” says Honorof.

That’s why schools such as Hofstra, NYU, Columbia, City University of New York and others have added arts or artslike components to their STEM curriculums.

Not only that, but in April, SAP, the world’s third-largest software company, opened an innovation lab on the 48th floor of 10 Hudson Yards, sandwiched between Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea, that encourages design-thinking and is accessible to learners in and out of school.

SAP Next-Gen, as the lab is called, is open to the community, says SAP vice president Ann Rosenberg. “Make an appointment, come in, get a coffee and look around,” she says, pointing out that the lab is home to an emotionally intelligent robot, Pepper, with whom you can converse. There are also augmented reality and virtual reality headsets you can experiment with, and much more.

The site has an area for “makers” — people who use computers to make “things” out of materials such as cardboard. There’s also room for meetups and other groups to explore topics like blockchain and IoT (Internet of Things), machine learning and more.

“It’s a space where technology and creative minds come together,” says Rosenberg. Other Next-Gen sites, such as one in Berlin, sponsored a fashion hackathon, where designers and technologists were given 48 hours to come up with edgy apparel. Projects included gloves that could translate sign language into speech and wearables that could connect women to other women as they walk home from work.

NYU’s STEAM program, offered at the Tandon School of Engineering, is just as edgy. Its students graduate with master’s degrees in integrated digital media. Required coursework ranges from Theories and Cultural Impact of Media & Technology to Creative Coding to Media Law, while electives run the gamut from multiscreen application development, live performance, sound, cinema and mobile augmented reality to interaction design, game design and more.

Javier Molina, who graduated from the program in 2015, debuted a virtual reality film, “To Be With Hamlet,” at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. Other graduates, some of whom have undergraduate degrees in engineering, architecture and technology, have gone on to design new products and experiences at companies including Google, Facebook, Audible.com, Viacom and more.

What’s different about NYU’s program, and STEAM programs in general, is that you don’t have to be “pigeon-holed” into a box, says De Angela Duff, codirector and industry associate professo of, integrated digital media at New York University. In the program, students can study Art+Technology, or Music+Technology, or work on projects involving user experience design, virtual reality, augmented reality and such.

In Duff ’s college days, you had to choose one or the other. “I wanted to go to art school, but I was really good at math,” she says. So Duff first pursued a bachelor’s degree in engineering, then a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, and finally a master’s degree in studio art. At NYU’s Integrated Media Program, students can build their own curriculum.

But that’s not the biggest perk of this particular STEAM program, according to Duff. “A big reason students come here is to extend their peer networks and to get access to things like NYU’s motion-capture studio (which is expensive, and therefore difficult to get your hands on.)”

So does a STEAM education make you really cool?

Honorof says it’s more practical than that. “The 21st century workplace won’t tolerate people working behind closed doors doing just science, just technology, just engineering or just math. We need everyone to know something about design, experimenting, even physics and sales,” she says. H

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