There's a moment that changed everything for Nyjah Munn, DSST: Conservatory Green ‘26. He was riding home from a summer camp, holding a drawing robot he'd just built. The small machine whirred and moved in his hands, tracing invisible patterns in the air. Then, without warning, it started to catch fire.
Most kids would have panicked. Nyjah fell in love.
"Whether it was the fumes or the fascination, I fell in love with STEM," he said.
Now a senior at DSST: Conservatory Green, Nyjah's journey from that burning robot to his ambitious dreams of reshaping human capability is a testament to curiosity, resilience and the power of finding your passion early. As we celebrate Black History Month, his story reminds us that representation in STEM isn't just about numbers. It's about creating space for Black students to dream bigger, build bolder and lead the way forward.
What first sparked your interest in STEM, and how did you know it was something you wanted to pursue?
I initially became interested in STEM through a summer camp program where I built a drawing robot. On the way home from the camp, I kept running the robot, fascinated with its movements. After a while, the robot started to catch fire in my hands, and - whether it was the fumes or the fascination - I fell in love with STEM.
What STEM classes, clubs, or projects have been most meaningful to you at DSST?
Creative engineering has to be one of the best classes I have ever taken, if not the best. The projects all seem so simple at first glance; regardless, balancing resources, collaboration and failure makes the class fun, challenging and is so powerful in building character.
What challenges have you faced in your STEM journey, and how did you push through them?
Throughout my STEM journey, I have found it difficult to ground myself in complex or overwhelming projects. Like the rest of the STEM field, I take on a lot of things that feel insurmountable, and I often find myself lost in complex ideas and redundant designs. Ultimately, what grounds me is my goal. When I set out to solve a problem, I focus on the people who I could impact, and it keeps me aligned with my goal. To me, engineering is about making an impact on someone's life. When I get caught up in all of the theatrics and enticing possibilities of engineering projects, I remind myself what is important.
What does it mean to you to be a Black student excelling in STEM?
I view being a Black student in STEM as more of a responsibility than a privilege. I value opportunity greatly, because I have seen and felt the impact of a lack of opportunity. As a Black student who was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to pursue the STEM field with support and resources, I don't just consider myself lucky, I consider myself to have a unique opportunity to uplift others. Being a Black student pursuing STEM is a front row seat to some of the inequalities and issues with the field, but more than that, it is an opportunity for me to uplift other unserved and underrepresented communities in and out of the STEM field.
What are your goals for the future - college, career or big dreams you're chasing?
I aspire to work somewhere like DARPA, where "moonshot" thinking is routine. But more than a career path, I want to engineer technologies that move with people rather than around them: exoskeletons that restore mobility better than wheelchairs; sensory tools that translate the world in new ways; robotics that lower the barrier to independence. I hope to build open-source platforms that help underserved communities develop their own innovations, widening the doorway to scientific participation. I also want to advance environmental technologies that don't just prevent damage but help humans and ecosystems recover together. The scale of these challenges does not intimidate me, it motivates me.
Ultimately, I hope to be the founder of a company centered on restoring and expanding human capability: a social venture. I want to become a social entrepreneur who employs doctors and provides the technology and means with which they may cure cancer, the engineers who reverse climate change and the ecologists who rebuild ecosystems. My dream is to operate a double-bottom-line company, rooted in humanitarian progress but sustained by contracts and invention, creating technologies that improve the world and generating the resources to do it again and again.
What advice would you give to younger Black students who are curious about STEM but unsure where to start?
If you are a young Black student interested in STEM but unsure where to start, you're already pretty much an engineer. The truth is, no matter how cool the technology or science on social media looks, the entire world is still pretty much unsure where to start in every major crisis that we are dealing with. The point of STEM isn't to know where to start, where to look or even where to go, it's to try anything. If you feel like you're shooting in the dark and missing every time that you try to start a project, you're well on your way to becoming a successful scientist. Once you get comfortable with that, just start doing what makes you happy. Save the world, prank your sister, whatever, just do it and have fun.
Nyjah's story is proof that the future of STEM belongs to students who aren't afraid to fail, who lead with purpose and who understand that innovation begins with asking "what if?" This Black History Month, we celebrate not just what Black students have accomplished in STEM, but what they will build next.