BLOGGER
Jenny Brown is a Mathematics and Physics double major in the College and was born and raised in the Silicon Valley in California. After transferring to Georgetown in the Fall of 2010, she is now...
Through this blog, students participating in the Berkley Center's Junior Year Abroad Network offer informal reflections on their time abroad.
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Religion Counts: The Rome Statement on the International Conference on Population and Development
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Jenny Brown on Starting JYAN in Ghana
October 4, 2011
I was raised by a couple of ex-NASA employees who assumed from a young age that I’d go into mathematics and in a part of the United States known for being progressive and tech-oriented. Now, as a woman studying a historically male-dominated topic in a country with some strong traditional gender roles – I’ve been told I’m the first girl in living memory to have ever taken one of my classes – the issue of gender and hard sciences is something I have to face on a near-daily basis.
The pure sciences (i.e. physics, math and the theoretical branches of computer science as opposed to agriculture, geology or physical geography) are not a priority in Ghana. I’m curious, in country with only a small (but growing!) tech industry and little to no scientific funding, which Ghanaians decide to go into math or physics and why. Furthermore, I think that advanced, theoretical and sometimes highly academic topics generally clashes with people’s impression of Africa, even people who have travelled widely or lived on the continent for extended periods. I would like to change that.