What is in a name? When we are born, we are often given a name which can stay with us for our whole lives. Sometimes we change our name. We sometimes change our first name because it just doesn’t seem to suit us. Sometimes we change our last name if we want to share a last name with a partner. Organizations go through similar processes.
Our grant-funded Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) group, founded by Prof. Lynn Cominsky with NASA funding in 1999, started with the name NASA Education and Public Outreach (NASA E/PO). The group’s STEM education work continued to be exclusively funded by NASA until 2015, when the NASA funding for education within the Science Mission Directorate changed. Together with Susan Wandling, who runs the Academic Talent Search program, Prof. Cominsky was able to secure funding from the Department of Education. This meant large changes in skill sets within the team as well as a different type of focus in the STEM education work done within the group. As Prof. Cominsky was able to diversify the group’s funding, keeping NASA in the name no longer made sense. The group needed a new name and SSU Education & Public Outreach, or SSU E/PO for short, seemed to better represent the new funding portfolio. It didn’t stop people from still calling us NASA, however, and the confusion with SSU’s EOP (Equal Opportunity Program) worsened.
In 2017, I joined the EPO group as the Associate Director. Almost immediately, staff began to ask for a new name. Since I had gone through the rebranding process in my previous STEM education job at UC Berkeley, I was excited to do this work at SSU too. In my previous work, I discovered that group and organization names are most effective if they are just a single word, or two at the most. Think of Apple, Nike, MicroSoft, Clover Sonoma as examples of successful names. Just as people know me as Laura, they have to get to know me to really know what does Laura mean? The same is true for brand names. It is through interactions with these brands that we come to know and appreciate them for what they provide. The same is true for STEM education organization names.
As the group separated from the Physics & Astronomy Department into our own Department, we spent time discussing possible names, building them from pieces of words that represent what we do, who we are and what we value. After pages of names, we finally landed on EdEon. Our tag line is “A STEM Learning Center” and the “Eon” part of the name implies education forever, or at least for all ages.
What can you expect from EdEon as we move into the future? We will be developing our own strategic plan to ensure our activities are aligned with those of both SST and SSU. We are also developing a new website to reflect what we do and what we want to do. As a fully grant-funded department, we already work across schools, supporting a wide variety of students doing STEM internships. In the future, we aim to support other groups and projects that may have administration, illustration, or staffing needs for their own grant-funded work. We look forward to engaging more SSU students in real-life applications that provide them opportunities for employment in fields they are passionate about.
If you are interested in learning more or seeing how your own work can be supported by EdEon, please email me for more information at laurap@universe.sonoma.edu. --Dr. Laura Peticolas, Associate Director of EdEon; EdEon logo and symbol designed by Aurore Simonnet, Scientific Illustrator