In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers struggle to get the right words out.

Part 1: After living with a stutter all her life, Sara Street thinks coding might be the solution to her communication problems.

Sara Street has lived in Idaho for seven years with her mom and dad after moving from Texas in 2019; however, her hometown is Greensboro, North Carolina. She is now pursuing her undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She has been very active within the STEM community for the past four years, especially within her school. She served as the Idaho State Secretary for the Technology Student Association (TSA), a student-led STEM CTSO. In her free time, she loves to read and paint.

Part 2: Electrical engineer Anna Fox longs to share her work with her family, but struggles with how to explain it.

Anna Fox is a scientist and device fabricator at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder Colorado. Besides working with superconducting integrated circuits, she is an avid biker, rafter, crocheter, and reader.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

For a very long time, me and my family have had this tradition to have a very fancy breakfast every weekend. It was like a super big treat for us after a long, hard week dealing with work and school, and it was where we could just recuperate for our entire week.

I remember this one specific weekend where we were going to this super bougee breakfast place. It was no IHOP or Denny's. It was like up here in fanciness.

Me and my mom, like we're preparing beforehand. We looked on Yelp. We studied that menu for a long time to know exactly what we wanted. When we even went in the restaurant, it was nicer than the website. It had like vines on the roof. Oh, my gosh, I was so excited.

Sara Street shares her story at Boise State University in November 2024. Photo by Joe Rodman.

As the hostess led us to our table, I was just repeating what I wanted to order over and over again. I was so prepared for them to say, “Hey, what do you want to eat?” because I was ready. I've done my homework.

But something happened when they said those words to me. It was like everything I had planned so thoughtfully in my head were stuck. I couldn't get them out how I wanted to.

The waitress was just staring at me for a long time with that very awkward customer service smile. I was like, “Yeah.”

My face got beet red. My hands were shaking and they were super sweaty. I did not want to be in this situation any longer, so I just picked something super random from the menu. It wasn't what I wanted, but at least I could tell the waiter something, at least.

The food, to my credit, was gross. It was overpriced, would not go again. But occurrences like these happened to me a lot. I've lived my life with a stutter.

Communication is not something that's easy for me. If I want to say something as simple as, "Hi" or like, "How are you?" I have to take those extra steps and it can get frustrating. It makes it feel like sometimes it isn't even worth speaking.

For a long time, I hated talking. Even if it's not vocal language, if you’re not able to get the words out that you want to, it can be so frustrating. And when I went onward to school, it carried through.

I was super awkward especially coming out of quarantine and being online for an entire year. My social skills, like, down there. It was not good. And being a 14‑year‑old being so isolated from everyone else was awful.

So, instead of reaching out or talking to other people, I locked myself in. I stayed behind that screen for a very long time. I didn't talk to anybody. I kept to myself. And those first few weeks were horrible.

My parents would go and ask, “How was school?”

“It was okay.” It was not okay. I hated it.

But it slowly got better. I was able to be introduced to a club called TSA. And, no, it's not the airport security. I wish, but no. It stands for Technology Student Association, which is basically a STEM‑based program which allows for students to compete in these competitions. And I was also bribed by pizza. It's insane on what pizza can do to get a teenager to do things.

So, I was able to learn so, so much about engineering and STEM, and also be able to make so many friends. I was able to break out of that shell I put myself in.

One competition that stood out to me the most and that I was so excited about was videogame design. I've grown up watching people play videogames for a very long time. Finally, it was my turn. I was overjoyed. I was able to reunite with friends from middle school and be able to make this whole world by ourselves. It didn't matter if I had a stutter. All that mattered was the work that I was able to do.

With this, I got super confident. I was like, “If I could do this, I can do anything.” So I volunteered to do all of the coding by myself. I've seen people do this in two days online, so it should be a walk in the park. It was not a walk in the park.

Surprisingly, learning an entire software and program it in under two months, and only having experience in a very beginner one‑semester Python course does not make you an expert programmer at all. But I was confident that I could do this and I did.

I spent hours and hours just watching YouTube videos, rewatching stuff, pausing at that exact moment. I was like, “I can do this.”

As soon as I found the software Unity by even more intensive research, a.k.a. Googling how to make a game, I was ready. So it was all installed, all ready. I was at my desk. I opened the computer, shut it immediately. I did not know what I was looking at at all. It was like a foreign alien something. There was like a thousand buttons, a thousand very specific configurations. I had no idea what any of them did.

But I didn't let that stop me. I continued to do the research. I continued to nitpick those YouTube videos. But even though I tried so hard, I kept getting error after error after error. It made me very frustrated for a long time. Things were going out of bounds. My characters weren't moving like they were supposed to, but I didn't let that stop me. I continued to do the best I could even when facing those errors. I continued to not look at it for a very long time, until I remembered that this was a project two weeks before it was due.

People work better under pressure, okay? So I was going to do this awesomely.

So I was locked in for those two weeks. I took my laptop everywhere. I had my tiny school Chromebook on one side and my super big laptop on the other side. I was writing my English paper on one part and then just typing away on my other computer. I got a lot of weird looks, but I was determined to get this done because I wanted to be on the same playing field as everyone else who was coding. I didn't want to take those extra steps. I wanted to just be me.

And so I was on it. I was able to get the game running and going. Mind you, it was not a good game, but it was something I made.

So, I was doing those final touches the next day at my desk. I opened up the laptop, couldn't find the file. I looked everywhere. I looked at my One Drive, I looked on my hard drives, I looked everywhere for that game that I spent so long working on. I lost like 48 hours of sleep to that game, but it was gone.

But I was very calm. I was very collected. I screamed and cried. I feel very bad for my parents who had to deal with me those last two days and those days that my entire world felt like it was going to crash in on itself. But I was able to make something work, barely.

I felt like I failed everybody. I thought that if I could do this by myself, I didn't need to focus on talking, and then I could be me. But it felt like for a long time after that file crash, that I was nothing, really. If I couldn't do this, what can I do?

But, still, I went to the competition, presented the work, got dead last but we were able to get those tiny “You participated” pins. That pin felt like it was mocking me every time I looked at it. It was like the size of my pinky. Hated it.

But even when I faced that failure, at least I was able to face it head on. And for a long time, I thought that this was it, but I was able to overcome it with the help of my family and also my team, and be able to see that this isn't the end of the world. It's, honestly, only a stepping stone for me. I was then able to become the state secretary of this club and then I was able to learn so much more stuff that I wouldn't have been able to if I just gave up.

I know that failure is hard. It's scary. But failure is not the end all, be all of stuff. I live with a stutter, I will for probably my entire life, and I'm still not awesome about coding, but I'm still learning and I'll still learn how to improve. And if you take one thing from my long spiel, just don't give up. Your failure will always help you improve in the future.

Part 2

My grandparents were very present in my upbringing. My grandfather was a retired naval officer and my grandmother was an elementary school teacher and a homemaker. I remember my grandmother was stern but loving, and she loved the family through cooking. Even though she claimed not to be a natural chef, there was always chocolate cake on birthdays and these amazing holiday spreads that I never realized were so hard to coordinate.

Anna Fox shares her story at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, UT in September 2024. Photo by Danielle Waters.

My grandfather was kind and funny, always with some joke that sort of passed right out of the reach of my understanding. Definitely like bathroom humor, like 100%. And when this happens, my grandmother would purse her lips in such disapproval and she'd shake her head. He would just laugh and laugh.

So, I tag along with my grandfather on his yardwork chores. That included me riding on the mower, me riding in the wheelbarrow, or me being carried around like a bag of mulch, so pretty much adding the weight of a four‑year‑old to anything he was trying to do. But since I was their first grandchild, I could pretty much get away with anything.

Education was a priority in the household. And just for context, we all lived together during some of my youngest years. I still have memories of sitting at this old folding card table set up in our living room where my grandmother tutored me in writing and arithmetic. To her constant frustration, my handwriting was terrible. It was awful. She wanted nothing more than for me to have this beautiful handwriting, but as young as I was, I just couldn't handle it, I couldn't do it. She never got to me because even today, I still have this terrible handwriting.

Besides the tutoring, we spent lots of time together drawing, coloring, making crafts. Examples of these drawings, and of course my best possible handwriting, adorned any magnetic surface that was available to display kid artwork. And when the refrigerator was full, old masterpieces were moved from the refrigerator to this cherished filing cabinet folder to be kept for years to come.

The years passed. I grew up. I moved away from home. They attended my graduations and, of course, I visited them on holidays. I transformed from a markers‑and‑construction‑paper kid into this science‑and‑engineering adult.

During this time of growing up, this time of growth, socializing wasn't easy for me. The more I surrounded myself with lab mates, other PhD students, and, eventually, other scientists, the less I interacted with people that were outside of my field. I, of course, exchanged emails and letters with my grandparents, mentioning my all‑consuming graduate school and, eventually, my all‑consuming work, but in all of these correspondences, we never talked about exactly what I was working on.

We never talked about my science, but, instead, we reminisced about the handwriting arithmetic and drawing and arts and crafts that we did as part of my childhood. I've never been anything but grateful to them for the support and learning and creativity they fostered, but once I reached grad school, I realized that we'd grown apart and I wasn't sharing everything with them.

Maybe a couple years back, I'm thinking maybe like 10‑ish years ago, long after I'd left home and finished my grad school, my group at NIST published a paper. Of course we publish lots of papers, but this was an important one. Like most of the papers that my project publishes, I fabricated the superconducting electronic device on which the important measurements were made.

It's my usual contribution. It's what I've chosen as a career and it's a pretty large part of who I am. It's a part of my identity. I feel that device fabrication is just an extension, a natural extension of my childhood of arts and crafts and making things. The things have gotten a lot smaller and the budget has gotten a whole lot bigger.

So when we received our paper copies of the journal, Transactions, when we got the journal with the paper in it, to my surprise, a big zoomed‑in picture of my device landed right on the front cover of this edition. It wasn't a glamourous photo, but it was my photo, and it was in a place that seemed important.

So I did what every kid does when they're really proud of something. I packed up my edition and I mailed it to my grandparents. Despite being extremely proud of my work, I generally shy away a little bit from talking about it with people outside the field for fear of coming off as braggy or know‑it‑all or, oh, my God, worst of all, boring, but I thought this was an opportunity that in one picture, one prop, to be able to break through this shyness and show my family something that's really cool and something I'm pretty good at, and maybe perhaps share a part of my personality that I hadn't been able to share with them in the past.

But at the end of the day, I also wanted them to be proud of me. Just like the crayon art that had accumulated under magnets on the refrigerator during my childhood, I figured maybe they would hang my picture on their refrigerator.

So I mailed the edition and then I forgot about it.

I didn’t get to see them often because I lived in Colorado and they lived in Delaware, and I certainly never thought I'd see this journal again. But when I visited their assisted living and I sat down in their living room, there on the coffee table, amongst all of their paper reading, was my journal.

It was worn out and dog‑eared. Creases in the paper showed that it had been opened many times to the actual article and not just admired for the pretty cover photo. And most surprising, lines, words, phrases, whole paragraphs had been highlighted and underlined and marked, like in any of their paper reading, like classic grandparent stuff, like in a used copy of the Wall Street Journal.

So I see my now‑ragged journal and they explain their efforts. They both read the journal article again and again, trying to understand what we were publishing. And just for clarity, they knew nothing of superconducting electronics. They weren't even particularly internet savvy. My grandmother would sit at the Google with my grandfather over her shoulder and they were looking up terms and definitions trying to understand.

Seeing my gaze on the journal, my grandmother picks it up and she says, "We tried so hard, but we couldn't understand the science."

It turns out that besides spending time trying to understand this article using all the resources that they had, they'd also showed all their friends what their scientist granddaughter was up to. And there was an entire assisted living community in Delaware with an edition of Transactions looking at this picture, reading this article, surely not understanding what a cryogenic integrated circuit was.

So, as hilarious and heartwarming and funny as this was, I was really sad when this happened. That's because even with my picture or my prop, I still lacked the ability to connect with them, this entire generation of my family, over something that is just so important to me.

After this event happened, I reflected on why I couldn't confidently share this part of my personality with people who aren't familiar with our field of work. I thought about the many times that I'd met an acquaintance and I was happy to hear about their job as a lawyer or whatever, but when asked about my job, I either redirected or gave a really short response, just fearing that glazed overlook that people get when they don't want to hear about science stuff.

But then I thought about my grandparents. I thought about their faces that day. They were eager for an explanation or even something simple they could share with their friends. And I realized it was my lack of confidence that was holding me back and making me miss out on connections with friends, family, and other people. I realized kind of at that moment that science communication with people from inside and outside your field is a skill that's super important and it was just something I didn't have. Like as a mid‑career, fairly established scientist, I was still having trouble discussing my work.

Thinking about that, I realized that I needed to dig deep and I needed to change, and that change needed to come from inside. But for me, it also presented an opportunity, and that opportunity was the ability to work on things for the next generation.

So, I decided to work on my own confidence while at the same time trying to help young people grow confident in their work by engaging in STEM and DEI and outreach work. Obviously, my work this year with ELEVATE has been motivated by my passion for reaching a whole community, especially students and young professionals, in an accessible and inclusive way. Seriously, anybody can design a superconducting circuit, am I right? But not everybody can reach our young people with such an enthusiasm for science and an ability to communicate it to emphasize its importance in our society.

So today, besides still fabricating superconducting integrated circuits for my project, I'm also a champion of drawing in folks of all backgrounds with accessible information about our field. I especially love giving lab tours to group members' families. Whenever possible, I show them how to gown up and come right into our clean room, and I show them the actual tools I use to make devices.

One time, my mother came to NIST in Boulder and she decided that gowning up was absolutely hilarious, even though this is something I have to do every day for my job. She couldn't stop laughing the entire tour. I guess the concept of having to put on special clothes over your normal clothes to go into the lab was just something that seemed odd and different and funny to her. But I think, ultimately, she was pretty impressed with what I was showing her.

Another time, very recently, we had a brand‑new graduate come inside and tour our clean room. She was able to look in the microscope at some devices that were in process and she recognized some structures that she had simulated and designed as part of her undergraduate research.

Prior to that moment, she had been slightly reserved but very professional in her mannerisms. But after that, she lit up with this glowing enthusiasm, this excitement about the work. Seeing some of her simulation work become real devices to be deployed just brought her right out of her shell. Even after giving a talk earlier on the topic, she just wanted to talk more and more and more about her simulations and her experiences. I couldn't have been happier to see that showing these devices just brought out such an enthusiasm.

So, I feel that what these experiences have shown me is that with passionate and accessible information and explanation, it is very much possible to connect with people over superconducting science. And seeing somebody grow confidence, light up, or have their mind blown is, for me, more rewarding than any prize or paper.

I never had the opportunity to explain to my grandparents what the journal article was about. It's too late because now they're both gone. I can't bring them to the lab or show them any more of my work. I think that I missed out on having them experience the joy that I finally found in discussing my science with folks regardless of background. And I'm sad that they didn't get to see my commitment to the next generation through outreach work or get to meet the confident scientist that I've grown into.

My grandmother always carried a tiny drawing that we made together. She carried it since I was a child, like a toddler. She carried it in her wallet. I know this because they gave it to me after they sorted her things after she died.

Now, I keep it close to me in my wallet. So, even though they missed out on so much because I lacked the skills to communicate my science and who I am with them, never once did I doubt that they loved me and that they were proud of me.

Thank you.