After reaching out to the Town of Prosper, Rock Hill junior Sherlyn Mathur and Prosper High School senior Nikhil Inuganti of the Prosper Engineering Team secured a proclamation declaring Feb. 16-22 as the official Prosper Engineering Week. 

During this week, the engineering team will celebrate its accomplishments and promote STEM education. 

“We felt that STEM is very important to us and to our culture, and to spread that in our city, having an actual proclamation is very important and monumental to us,” Mathur said. 

The Prosper Engineering Team consists of three groups: Lady Talons, Techno Talons and Robo Talons. Mathur is a member of the Lady Talons team, while Inguanti is part of Robo Talons. Despite being on different teams, they collaborated to secure the proclamation.

“The reason I, part of Lady Talons, and my partner, who’s part of Robo Talons, worked for this is because we wanted to showcase how it matters to have STEM be a lot more popular in our community,” Mathur said. 

On Feb. 11, Mathur and Inuganti attended a Prosper town council meeting, where they received the proclamation. They hope this designated week will increase awareness of the engineering team and distinguish it from other teams in the area. 

“It’s gonna be reaching out to new people every single year because the town of Prosper is always growing,” Inuganti said. “Every single year new people know about it, and new students wanna join our team and so forth.”

Since Lady Talons is an all-girls team and Techno Talons and Robo Talons include many minority students, this week also serves to highlight underrepresented groups in robotics.

“Through this we will be able to encourage a lot of people who may not be interested at first, to come and help fill out any gaps that we currently have,” Mathur said. “This is really important to all of us because we all really care about STEM.”

Recognizing Prosper Engineering Week brings visibility to the three teams. 

“When we say we have three robotics teams within Prosper ISD, people are like, ‘I had no idea’,” robotics coach and engineering teacher Min Smart said. “First and foremost, having that visibility is huge for our program and it helps sustain our program as more people become aware that it is a program that’s offered through the district.” 

Beyond strengthening their visibility and image, the week will also allow the teams to educate the community and younger students about STEM.

“When you think about the elementary schools they have the STEAM classes, but that’s kind of it,” Smart said. “Providing an opportunity to celebrate the whole idea of science, technology, engineering, and math and providing different activities and having a week dedicated to that, I think is a great thing for the community to enjoy.”

To obtain this proclamation, Mathur and Inuganti initially submitted a form on the Town of Prosper’s website but later expedited the process by directly contacting the mayor.

“I found out that we could make this proclamation, and then I brought it up to my friend Sherlyn and then we tried to get it completed, but we didn’t hear back from them,” Inuganti said. “I was already interviewing the mayor for something else, so that’s when I brought it up to him and he took me over to his secretary, then that’s when we communicated back and forth, and that’s how we also sped up the process.”

The teams are still finalizing events for the week, but they have planned an open-house showcase for the community to explore their workshop.

“There’s a lot of different things that we could do for that week, but essentially our goal for that week would be to give back to our community and to spread STEM to our community, and let them know what we’re doing and how it matters to them,” Mathur said.

For Mathur, this proclamation is more than just a title—it’s an opportunity for students to explore and potentially join STEM-related activities.

“I wasn’t introduced to STEM until the eighth or ninth grade, and it was considerably late,” Mathur said. “We can encourage younger girls and they can find out they have a love for STEM a lot earlier on and foster and grow that for a lot longer than I got to. I think it sort of heals a part of me that wishes I had that for a lot longer, so that is really what the proclamation means to me: a chance to give a little girl the chance I didn’t get to have.”