Stocks, data science and AI all sound like topics for a Wall Street boardroom, but at the high school, they are the focus of the Insight Innovators club, where students learn to market like professionals and build lifelong skills.
Founded last spring, the Insight Innovators club meets every X-block in room 129 to introduce students to underrepresented areas of STEM like data science, finance, AI and investment. Juniors and co-founders Avyaya Jha, Jacob Fisch and David Kim aim to make financial literacy more accessible to students through a variety of mediums, from projects such as investment portfolios to taught lessons.
Jha said that a big purpose of the club is to bring light to topics that are not discussed much in the context of general education.
“[What] we hope to achieve is to foster learning and interest in [underrepresented] topics so that students who have not been exposed to these fields can find interest and potentially pursue these things,” Jha said.
Junior and club member Nikita Semyannikov said the club is important because having an understanding of market trends and investment can help students prepare to enter the adult world.
“Helping people learn about stocks and financial literacy is a really important part of life,” Semyannikov said. “It’s especially important in high school because [high school] is the transition from being a kid to having a job, doing taxes and eventually going into college where you’re going to have more responsibilities.”
Junior and co-president Jacob Fisch is involved in investing and said he hopes to foster interest in business by connecting students with successful people in the business world.
“If we can get some meetings going with [people who work in business], our members can get advice and insight from people who do this for a living,” Fisch said.
According to Jha, this year the club will focus on the role and impact of AI in the financial world, which is often complex and hard to understand.
“We want to make an investment portfolio and we’re going to be using AI to guide that,” Jha said. “We really want to emphasize how we can use AI to delve into interesting but hard to understand [concepts] and reasons why things happen.”
Semyannikov began trading his own stock portfolio in the fall of his freshman year. He said having a club like Insight Innovators would have benefitted him then.
“In the World of Money class, everyone that I’ve talked to said that stocks were the thing that they’re the most interested in,” Semyannikov said. “But it’s hard to grasp the idea of them without actually trading them. And I think having a hands-on interaction helps you learn about the process of trading stock.”
