This is the full transcript for Episode #323 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Emily Cho – Prison Teacher, Juvie for STEM Founder. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
Emily Cho 0:00
You don’t know how people change in the future, so I think it’s always good to know be in good relations with everyone.
Max Branstetter 0:21
Hello. Welcome back to Wild Business Growth. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning wild ideas into wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, founder and podcast producers, producer at MaxPodcasting. I never stumble over my words, and you can email me at , this is episode 323, and today’s guest is Emily Cho the founder of Juvie for STEM, aka JSTEM. They are a nonprofit mostly run by students that helps to educate those in juvenile detention centers and other corrections facilities and subjects like stem and beyond. In this episode, we talk Emily’s time in prison. Sounds kind of funny when you say that volunteering, even going way back to middle school and high school, how to build a business and run a business while something else takes up a ton of your time. Freshman year of college at Cornell and Emily’s work with the Large Hadron Collider is something that I know nothing about. It is Emily Emjoyyyy the showwwww!
Allllrightyyyyy we are here with Emily Cho, founder of Juvie for STEM, aka JSTEM, one of the coolest, most unique, riveting even, will blend into true crime, no just businesses that you’ll ever come across. So really, really cool nonprofit doing groundbreaking things. Emily, thank you so much for joining. How you doing today?
Emily Cho 2:04
Thank you so much. I’m doing very good, actually, not a morning person. So this is perfect afternoon. Should I introduce myself?
Max Branstetter 2:12
Well, sure, we can keep it short and sweet, but I will. I will have to introduce though that you kind of revealed before, this is your first ever podcast, correct? This is my first ever podcast. Well, you’re doing fantastic. Thank you. The way I like to do it, instead of, like a full intro, the way I like to dive in is like asking, like a kind of a random but fascinating question about your background. So from your standpoint, like, what is it about prisons and detention centers that first got you interested?
Emily Cho 2:45
I was always interested in more of a history of how prison reform works. So I know there’s a lot of legal things that have changed over the past couple decades, but I always think that there is still a very large marginalized group within prisons. And then there’s so many disparities within them that needs to be resolved, but they are very much overlooked oftentimes. And then, you know, people in prison, especially the youth, they are one of the most vulnerable populations in society, but no one’s paying attention to them because of the negative stigma that surrounds the idea of working in a quote, unquote prison. I That’s how I created the idea of, okay, like, I’m good at something. I’m good at coding. I like science, and, you know, I had a lot of financial success, even at a young age, through my passion for the sciences. So I was thinking, when people get out of prisons, or when youth gets out of their juvenile sentences, they oftentimes don’t have an adequate enough education or prior experience to be getting qualified jobs. And you know, that’s not very good considering, okay, like, how are they going to get money? How they going to sleep at night? So they oftentimes re offend because of that sort of logic. So I was thinking like, Okay, since I found success doing this, and you know, as people know, like, computer science is a growing industry, and Cs, yes, I like, it’s a difficult major, of course, but it’s also very profitable if you’re good at it. So my idea was I can teach people hard skills, which are they’re teachable soft skills, not as much, but hard skills is very easy to learn. I’m just going to teach people stem and then hopefully that can turn into their future career paths.
Max Branstetter 4:35
What is it about STEM in particular that’s always kept you fascinated? I think
Emily Cho 4:40
when I was growing up, I was actually not very academically successful. I was a straight C, like 7060s, students until like the end of elementary school. So this was like 1012, years old. I thought
Max Branstetter 4:53
you were gonna say until like the end of high school, elementary I don’t even know if we had letter grades. Traditional.
Emily Cho 5:02
I didn’t really understand. So I come from a very traditional, not very traditional, but my parents are Asian immigrants, so there’s, like the stigma in Asian countries that you have to study. And you know, if you go to Asia, everyone’s very academically successful. They’re also very smart, but that comes from the result of studying a lot. So my parents would try to enforce that on me when I was growing up. And I I personally don’t like doing something when someone tried to force me to do something, so I would just never study. Thus my grades were not very good when I was growing up. And then I realized from one point that, like, I was actually really good at math. And so I was like, wait, I like, kind of like this, like, this makes so much sense. So from there, like, anything that had to do with math, I kind of came to me really easily. So last year in high school, I took organic chemistry, which isn’t exactly math based, but because I had a foundation in chemistry that was very math based, I was easily able to grasp more complicated theoretical concepts. Like, that’s the same thing with physics. I’m not sure, not that many people know this. But physics came before math. So math was created for physics to, like, help with physics. So I physics was also, like, it came more naturally to me. I didn’t really struggle with it that much. So I took three, four years of physics so far.
Max Branstetter 6:29
Well, physics, I just always think of Sir Isaac Newton and like, the laws, yeah, pretty much, yeah.
Emily Cho 6:36
Everything comes after that. So
Max Branstetter 6:38
once you get some momentum going, it just keeps going. Let’s dive more into J stem. So as you mentioned, you’re at a pretty not that you are at an old age right now, but you are at a pretty young age when you started this really successful non profit. How did you find yourself in the in that sort of situation where, like, your friends are, probably, I don’t know, out doing all sorts of things that, like most middle schoolers do and you are, like, helping, volunteering at prisons and detention centers and wanting to better their lives and potential.
Emily Cho 7:13
I think from like, elementary school, probably when I was not studying, I was probably getting interested in, like, prison reform, or just how the prison system works, or the legislation behind how the prison system works. And then, you know, when you go to history class, you learn a lot about prison mistreatment over the decades, but you think, like, okay, like, if you think about it, like 100 years isn’t that long ago. Like, that’s kind of recent, to be honest. So it was mainly out of curiosity, but I started trying to, like, get in contact with all my local correctional facilities and prisons, and most of them don’t really let minors in because, you know, safety, and you know there’s a bunch of when you first go into volunteer, there’s a lot of this application is a background check, there’s interviews, and there’s kind of a lot, so there’s usually don’t let minors in. But I was able to get in contact with one prison, which was, like, almost two hours away, like, like surround show, maybe, like, a little less than, like, maybe, like, three and a half hours. But I really wanted to do it, so I, like, begged my mom to drive me, because I didn’t have a license back then. I wasn’t the age to drive yet, so I started volunteering there. And then, if you go to prison, they have a program where you can sign up to volunteer to help tutor people. So I was allowed to tutor kids in algebra, because I took Algebra. By that point, I was good at it, so I helped them with that. I also taught them how to read. There were kids that didn’t know how to read or how, like, know when you’re young, you like, teach kids how to read by, like, sending out each letter. So we would be doing that. And then it kind of like, stuck with me. I always liked volunteering. I spent most of my high school years doing that in the hospitals, for example, and other correctional facilities. And then if I wasn’t doing that, I was, you know, either coding, maybe taking a nap at times. So no, I had a very structured life. And even now I’m very organized. Like, I like to have things in blocks every day. So like, for example, if I wake up at 7am and then until like 5pm every day is going to be from 75 so be, like, very structured. But then the only thing that I would change is what I do in that time. So, like, maybe I’ll be working at, you know, I’ll be launching at this prison from like Monday to Friday, like no this juvenile center over the weekends, from like 10 to three. So it was kind of like that system, because I spend so much time there, I you to meet a lot of people, and then you to talk to a lot of people. So I was talking to, like, a whole different variety of people that I’ve never interacted with, because I grew up in a very Asian town. I think the majority of people there are Korean, and then maybe. Like 10% of other races. So for me, it was kind of like a new experience, because I was being so such a diverse group of individuals from all different ages. I think from that, I was kind of inspired to, like, okay, like they’re stuck here. They can’t do anything about that. And I personally can’t really help that out, either. But talking with people, I was like, okay, there seems to be a large gap here between, obviously, medical treatment, that’s still a really big thing in the medical field, and how to provide these individuals with the adequate medical treatment that are required, but then they also don’t have the funding for it, because getting funding for prisons, or, like, any you know, correctional facilities, is often very hard. So that was one thing. So I was like, I don’t have the money to donate, like, millions of dollars into this institution, but what I can do is I can get, like, a group of like, maybe, like, maybe, like, local, like, 10 teenagers or, you know, college students that want to help out and kind of teach them basic things that you would typically learn in whatever major you want to major in. So I think that’s kind of how I started out with it was a very small group, and then, you know, word of mouth. We didn’t really do any, like, online advertising, we don’t, we still don’t have, like, an Instagram or Tiktok account because of that, because there’s just so many, like, legal loopholes that you have to, like, go through, like, you can be a picture in a prison and want to post it, like, that’s not how it works, yeah,
Max Branstetter 11:33
prison selfies, I’m sure, are very popular.
Emily Cho 11:37
So because of that, we mainly just grew from word of mouth. So like, you know, someone does volunteering with me. We’re like, telling their friends from, like, the next day that like, oh, like, I’m volunteering at this prison, and then they will be telling their parents about it, and they’re like, oh, like, my friend volunteers at this prison, and their parents like, why don’t you do something like that?
Max Branstetter 11:55
So like, and then daily email me. It’s peer pressure from parents. Yeah, pretty
Emily Cho 12:00
much, like, I’ve gotten so many emails from parents asking, like, oh, like, what’s like, the minimum age that kid can volunteer? And then, obviously, it’s like, different by state, it’s typically from 14 to 16, that’s the minimum. But parents would be emailing me, like, Can my kid join? Like, how can I stand on my kid? So that was really interesting. I was not expecting that. But because of that, it kind of like grew because of that. And I think a lot of people were also really interested at the idea of, like, oh, like, I can go into a prison, like, I’ve never been into one. I know the Kardashians went to one, like, the end of last year to visit prisons and to talk about prison reform. I feel like it’s an experience that everyone should get at least once in their lives. It’s very you, kind of like you walk out of there being like, feeling a lot more grateful of like, what you do on the like, on a daily basis. Yeah.
Max Branstetter 12:50
I mean, the whole thing’s just mind blowing. But you mentioned that how much you like structure and kind of organize blocks like that. How did you start to infuse structure into J stem, like, as was turning into a business. Like, what the actual like? Like, how? What did you actually like start doing? You know, with the I don’t know if inmates is the right term, or
Emily Cho 13:13
we just typically address them as like, students, like, I think as a group, we obviously gonna always have more students than we do have volunteers. So we tell we typically do it is once, you know, we get approval from a prison and then their, you know, directors board whatnot, that, like, we can come in, and then all the volunteers have their IDs and they have gotten background checks. We go in, and then how it usually starts off is that the workers there will tell people, like, oh, like, we have this nonprofit, like, group of nonprofit here that are going to teach you, like, is you just like basic things in the beginning. So like, math, English, you know, that sort of things we also do support chemistry, physics lab experiments, but then those often include much more funding. For example, for the biology labs, we need to get microscopes funded, which are very expensive, typically, until we have, like, a decent number of students that are willing to join that we try to support that a little bit. After once, we get a decent following, like a base of a group of students that are, you know, pretty dedicated to learning. So from there, we split up into different sections. So it’s usually, you know, because not everyone in a prison is going to be at the same math level. For example, like you could have someone who’s in, like, pre algebra, and you have someone who’s, like, getting ready to take calculus. So we usually split it up by a volunteer with a small group of students with teaching a singular math level. We also supply, like, the small whiteboards with Expo markers. So that’s the thing that we use. And then we try to make. Of fun. We don’t try to make it into like, this is this, and then this is how you do it. We don’t really like that kind of just like, I think understanding the concepts in a way that you can easily see it in three dimensions is very important. We actually had one student who was very smart. He was taking calculus three, which was insane. Calculus three is multi variable calculus, but much of it is in the three dimensions calculus. So we were kind of helping him, like, envision, like, okay, like, if you have an ice cream cone, how we’re gonna calculate the volume that overlaps between the ice cream the sphere and in the cone. In that sense, like, having objects was very useful. So in that sense, we structured. We had structures, even within our structured like sessions of different subjects. Another way that we did it was that when we got a decent number of kids that were willing to learn like this other subject. So we also supply robotics, for example, linguistics, as I said before, we have different science lab sections opened. And then a really big one that’s growing right now is computer science sessions. So we have no people that want to learn AI. That’s a big one. And then there’s also different coding languages, since they’re all, no, they’re all, they’re all coding languages. But then they’re all very different how you can use them. So there’s no c plus plus c, Ruby, Python, Java, JavaScript, for example. Like, these are the basic ones. I was
Max Branstetter 16:28
gonna say you could probably add like, two or three more in there that you just totally made up. And I’d be like, yeah,
Emily Cho 16:35
no. So we would also get funding for, like, laptops, Chromebooks, for example, where we can install packages for coding that were large enough. So that also means that if the storage on the laptop wasn’t big enough, we would need to open up the laptop and then add in more storage to that. And then it was also really nice that we had a separate outside group. So the group of volunteers I’m talking about right now are like the volunteers that the in house volunteers are willing to go in person to teach. But then we also had another group of students that were mainly just like fixing up parts, tech parts, or like collecting donations and then sending them over to different facilities. This group were the ones that typically got all like the donated tech parts or old laptops that couldn’t be used. So if it can’t be used, we typically try to either sell them off again for parts and then that funding will be used later on for something else, or if we can fix it, then we get that, we package it up, and then we ship it to the facilities, or whoever’s the regional like board president for that facility, and then the other group that we have, so it’s three main groups. So the last one I’m talking about is the outreach group, and they were the ones that were typically emailing for sponsors or reaching out to different libraries cafes, asking them if we can, like, host a meeting, or, like, maybe like a book drive or coat drive. The most recent one that we did was a coat drive because it was winter and in the New Jersey, New York area up here, it’s very cold up here right now. That’s the most recent one we are planning right now with the outreach members for a back to school drive for the fall season. So
Max Branstetter 18:21
well, it’s just amazing that you’re doing all these things like to begin with, like it’s a lot on your plate, and starting a business is like a whole endeavor. But for those listening so, Emily is recording this from a library at Cornell, and the reason which, by the way, is a record for first wild Business Growth podcast guests recording live from an Ivy League campus. But Emily’s a freshman in college, and so as if you know there wasn’t enough on your plate, you have, oh, freshman year of college as well, which is like a huge life adjustment. And there’s, you know, classes and extra extracurricular activities, even if you can’t pronounce it takes up so much of your time. How are you able to manage, like, still manage this business and focus on growing it and, like, helping out more more students. I did it right that time while you, like, are focusing on being a full time student yourself as well.
Emily Cho 19:16
I came into college kind of knowing pretty much a career path that I wanted to take. I’m very interested in doing a biotech software startup in the future. So because of that, I’m currently working towards a computer science degree in the College of Engineering. So because of that, I was able to use a software that Cornell already has, this that I can kind of see what courses are offered which semester, and then I’m also taking winter classes and summer classes to make sure I’m not falling behind because I have an idea of what I’m going to take which classes. It’s very easy for me to kind of schedule around that. When I get my schedule finalized for anything, the first thing I do is. Open my glue counter and add that in so I don’t forget. I get so many emails in the day. It’s kind of crazy. I had to make a separate email for, like, a personal use, but it’s, I think having that and knowing exactly, like, okay, like, at this time and this day I needed to be here. And then also, since I am a college student and I do not have a car on campus, I do need to walk everywhere. But Cornell is a huge campus, so from my dorm to the engineering building that I had to go this morning, that was a mile at 8am because of that, if I’m going to schedule anything after this 8am thing that I’m going to do tomorrow, it probably should be near or on the way, so I’m not wasting time by no going back and forth all day, yeah,
Max Branstetter 20:47
taking me back to, like, the, I mean, at the time of this recording, the like, freezing cold walks through campus that are just never ending. The I still have PTSD from that. So more power to you. I feel like people have so many, like, perceptions about, you know, people who are in prison and in detention centers, like, what? What’s something that you would say would probably surprise most people about the students you work with, not
Emily Cho 21:13
necessarily the students alone, but I think a general population. So I, because I am an engineer. I really like numbers, so I kind of did like a small survey. It had, I think around 2200 people that I interviewed. That’s a big survey. I think in the realm of research, I think it’s quite small, but maybe like the number alone is like, it is a big number. 200 is quite a lot, but what I found was that over 70% come from families that have internal issues. So that includes like domestic violence, parents that know get divorced, or just like a family that doesn’t get along essentially, and have a very bad environment for the kid that’s growing up. So I feel like, you know, when people think of prisons, I feel like the general stigma is like, oh, like, these are the gangsters that you don’t you shouldn’t get associated with in your life. You know, stay away from these people. I think it’s important to approach everyone with, like, a feeling of sympathy and just empathy in general. Like you need to be able to hear people out, know how their life has gone until this point that you’ve met them, you don’t know how people change in the future. So I think it’s always good to know be in good relations with everyone.
Max Branstetter 22:37
Well, that was a beautiful way to put a bow on everything, but I’m gonna throw you a curveball. I want to wrap up with some rapid fire. Q, A, you ready for it? Okay, all right, let’s get wild. I heard you’re a fan of true crime podcast. What’s your all time? All time favorite True Crime podcast, I
Emily Cho 22:59
don’t remember the name. It’s a girl, but I don’t want to name exactly, but I was just, I was just listening to her yesterday, and she was covering a case about it was a giant rape case in Korea. It had over like 80 rapists involved. And then she was talking about how Korean legislation, it’s kind of still not modernized, the point where kids under, I think it’s 413, years old, can pretty much get away with all crimes, pretty much what’s going on in Korea right now. And my dad and I were actually talking about this, how the age of responsibility in Korea is so low that kids in middle school, so they’re under 1314, years old, pretty much they’re hijacking cars, they’re killing people, they’re raping people. It’s like the worst possible crimes you can think of, and then they pretty much won’t get charged with anything because they’re under the age of legal responsibility. If that rings a bell to anyone, yeah, that was the podcast that I listened to a lot,
Max Branstetter 24:01
yeah, a lot of terrible, uh, keywords to search there in your podcast.
Emily Cho 24:06
It’s really important, though I feel like to, you know, obviously don’t listen to true crime for like, the idea of, like, getting some sort of sick fat, like, fascination out of it. But just to get an idea of, like, yes, like, the world is, like, all bright and happy and like, wow, we see snow outside today. But there’s also, like, there are people in life that will lie to you and try to manipulate you, and you have to be, even if you are a really trusting person, just to always have in the back of your mind. When I was in prisons, I was talking with a whole lot of people, and then, you know, there’s pregnant women, there’s men that you know smoke weed right before they come see me, and I can really smell that. Most people are very nice. They’re very honest individuals. But there are people that I’ve met that try to manipulate and lie to my face. I did work as a medical assistant, short my. Of time in one of the prisons, and then they would try to lie to me or manipulate me to get, like, an extra dose of something else, so like, just to be, like, on your feet, pretty much at all times. Yeah,
Max Branstetter 25:12
I think that’s that’s great advice, versus so many things in life. All right, what is a TV show or movie, some form of entertainment that’s like your favorite TV show or movie that involves a prison. Think it
Emily Cho 25:31
was the 911 the drama series, I think, yeah, it came out in 2018 it’s called 911 it has eight seasons in it, and pretty much every episode be like a different scenario. So of like a true 911 case, you kind of feel it in real time, because you’re receiving the perspectives of the people that are calling 911 who are very panicked. And then you get to see, like, the potential direct responses of, you know, the people that are answering the phone rescue operators, how they’re getting to the scene on time. Who’s going to the scene, how many people are going so you get like, a feeling of, like stress, anxiety, but also like relief. And you’re kind of like, you know that it’s fake in the episode, but then, like, just knowing that, like, something like this actually happened in real life is also like, kind of chilling, yeah,
Max Branstetter 26:21
oh, chilling. Oh, that’s an incredible word. I have chills now, all right. And last one, I’m gonna pronounce this wrong, but you’ve done some work with a company called Atlas for the Large Hadron Collider. Hey, Hadron, Hadron, Hadron,
Emily Cho 26:38
Hadron, Hadron. Oh, you’re fine. You’re fine.
Max Branstetter 26:41
I’ve seen that word before and I’ve heard it, but obviously I did not internalize it. But I know it’s like, really, really mind blowing stuff. What’s a really interesting insight from your work with you know that, hey, drop collider. Oh,
Emily Cho 26:55
well, so the purpose of this is to use so lasers. So we’re using lasers. It’s, you know, you
Max Branstetter 27:02
guys need to really dumb it down for me here. So
Emily Cho 27:06
even at Cornell, actually, I’m currently joining a lot that does like a similar approach. But in the medical field, the medical field is developing every day, and it’s really good that technology is advancing so quickly right now, because a lot of industries can make really good use out of it. So pretty much the research that I was participating in was how to center these lasers and then gathering data from these proton collisions, laser collisions, for example, and then how we can interpret that data and then potentially use that for some other medical device in the making. A recent one that that I’m like currently thinking about is a laser hitting, for example. If you hit like an animal, for example, and then it has some sort of cell reactivity, you kind of observe that. And then I’ve seen people at MIT who have detected breast breast cancer through it like years in advance. So it’s a really cool thing. And I think everyone should at least think that lasers are cool. You know, they’re all over Star Wars. So,
Max Branstetter 28:12
yeah, I’m totally with you, yeah. And we’ve done some work on the podcasting side with a group that does, like proton therapy, that basically is like the laser proton beams, in terms of like you were saying, like detecting and treating cancer, and it is unbelievable. And so really, really excited, really cool, as if you needed more exciting things to be doing with your life. Emily, thank you so much. This has been an absolute blast. And I would not have guessed this was your first podcast interview. You nailed it. So thanks so much for coming on. Yes, of course, my pleasure, it didn’t come through at all. But where is the best place for people to learn more about J stem, and then if they want to connect with you online,
Emily Cho 28:51
as I said before, we don’t really have like, a social media or anything, but we did a website, GV for stem.org, or you can just send an email to juvie for if you want to get in personal contact with me, you can email my school email, which is Ec 940
Max Branstetter 29:11
perfect, awesome. And then, yeah, that’s good for any Ithaca records as well. And then last thing, final thoughts, it could be just like a quote or kind of a few words of wisdom to sign us off here, whatever you want, send us out. I had
Emily Cho 29:24
a really fun time. I’m so happy that you asked me to come on here today. It was very interesting. I think, of an experience that I hopefully can have an opportunity to do one more time in the future. But I think hopefully my time at the podcast here today, this half hour, has kind of given people a time to rethink about their potential biases or no thoughts about prison reform, and then hopefully that they can kind of join with some reform, maybe not prisons in particular, but there’s a lot going around right now. There’s a really there’s so. Many amazing organizations doing a lot of great things,
Max Branstetter 30:06
doing great things, something Emily knows just a bit about. Thank you so much Emily for coming on Wild Business Growth and sharing your wild story. And thank you Wild Listeners for tuning in to another episode to hear more Wild stories like this one. Make sure to follow Wild Business Growth on your favorite podcast app and subscribe on YouTube for the video versions YouTube is @MaxBranstetter for anything else Wild Business Growth or MaxPodcasting or Max Branstetter. You can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com there. You can also find the place to subscribe to the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. And until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!
