STEMPunk Cafe: Supporting Scholarship as Conversation for Informal STEM Research

Many students have extracurricular interests they research outside of class. With the increasingly flexible rules of scholarly communication, students are becoming a part of the scholarly conversation without realizing it. STEMPunk Café was born out of a desire to help students see that their interests can have an equal scholarly weight to their schoolwork. This bi-weekly conversation series gives students an informal forum to share their research. We tied the series to the framework concept “scholarship as conversation” by coaching students through publishing their presentation in the institutional repository and citing it on their resume or CV.