NYC Gazette

Celebrating the longstanding partnership between Yeshiva University and the Washington Heights community, YU’s START Science club held its year-end event on May 24 on the Wilf Campus. Hundreds of local schoolchildren, YU’s START Science student-volunteers, and University faculty and administrators participated. The Bickoff Family, the program’s benefactors, also attended.

START Science volunteers work with schoolchildren at one of the event's six science stations. For more than a decade, START Science, a YU student-run program, has provided science enrichment to local schoolchildren through weekly in-class demonstrations on topics such as biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Currently active in four Washington Heights schools, START Science primarily works with grades four to seven. Each YU student volunteer is dedicated to a specific team that works with the same elementary class throughout the semester. With nearly 240 undergraduate volunteers, START Science boasts one of the largest memberships of all YU student-run clubs.

Designed like a science fair, the event offered hours of hands-on learning in the BioBus, a mobile science lab equipped with stations dedicated to six different science disciplines. Young scientists engaged in live experiments and demonstrations using research-grade microscopes, dissecting frogs, and illustrating aerodynamics by constructing paper airplanes.

Thanking the Bickoff Family for their support of the program, Avishye Moskowitz '25YC, vice president of the student-run club said it “enables YU students to put into practice the University’s core values and give back in a deeply meaningful way.”

Dr. Karen Bacon, Dean of the Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences at YU praised those involved and highlighted that “START Science has been a wonderful initiative that has had an enduring positive impact not just on the children of Washington Heights but also on YU’s student volunteers.”

New to this year’s event were certificates of completion awarded to students by members of the Bickoff family. Congratulations were extended to START Science's young learners and YU volunteers for guiding these aspiring scientists throughout the year.