It’s about 9 a.m. on a Thursday in Annette Caldwell Simmons Hall on SMU’s campus, and 30 girls, ages 12 to 14, walk into a classroom to the sound of cheers, hugs, high-fives, and noisemakers. This is GEMS Camp—girls interested in engineering, mathematics and science.

It was started by Saki Milton, who was a teacher before becoming a founder.

“I started noticing that the girls who I taught in seventh and eighth grade, once when they started moving up with me, they started kind of acting like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to do these things,’” she said.

GEMS founder Saki Milton [Photo: GEMS]

Milton wondered what math in an all-girl environment might look like, began researching, and discovered that educating girls separately was a hot topic.

“This was being studied sociologically, psychologically—and I wanted to do something about it,” she said.

Taking shape 

The idea for GEMS Camp started to form—a small cohort of girls entering seventh, eighth, and ninth grade in the fall, learning together and helping each other. They are admitted through an application process to keep the cohorts manageable.

Classroom time [Photos: GEMS]

GEMS earned its nonprofit status in 2014, which also marked the first year of longitudinal tracking. As of July 2025, 1,300 girls have come through the program, and 85% of them have gone on to major in a STEM subject in college.

Fourteen-year-old Ashley Castro will be a freshman in high school in the fall; this is her third year participating.

“When I was in fifth grade, I had a teacher who helped me a lot. Then I took an engineering class my middle school year … I keep coming back because I really love it here,” she said.

She said she doesn’t like to sit still and appreciates the hands-on learning she gets through GEMS.

Earning a reputation   

The cohorts are 80% local DFW students, but word is getting out.

“I have a girl from Georgia who comes every year, and one from Philadelphia. We also get girls from Lubbock, Houston, and Midland,” Milton said.

Once they age out of the program, many come back as mentors and volunteers.

“One of the kids, Kennedy, came back and worked for us part time. She just graduated from Florida A&M and now she’s applying to grad school because she wants to be an animal scientist,” she said.

STEM in nature [Photo: GEMS]

Another GEMS alum secured a TCU Chancellor’s Scholarship and will be studying biomedical engineering.

With multiple stories like this, you might think that parents would be pushing their daughters into the camps—but Milton said getting parental consent can be the hardest part.

“Most of our clients are first-gen students,” she said. “So it’s really hard to get their parents to understand the landscape.”

More than mathematical equations 

Each camp day starts with a “bling up,” where the girls celebrate each other’s success.

Mary Cabanas is the site director. She emigrated from Mexico in middle school and remembers how hard it was just to learn English.

At GEMS Camp, the girls learn not just advanced problem-solving but also the soft skills that are critical to navigating the professional world—like meeting someone with a firm handshake and eye contact, creating a résumé, and asking for letters of recommendation. The goal is to empower them academically and personally.

“We teach them how to manage their feelings, how to manage themselves, and become leaders,” Cabanas said.

Every camp also includes a service project—something more than a “what I did on my summer break” report. It’s a chance to add value and see the impact of their skills. For this cohort, the girls are creating an AI cybersecurity training program for a nonprofit.

“It will incorporate AI—they’ll use ChatGPT to create a script, and then they have to make an avatar that speaks,” she said.

Seeing math in the world [Photo: GEMS]

Khadija Marenah, 15 years old and heading into ninth grade, said the skills and confidence she’s gained at GEMS help her throughout the school year.

“My science fair project—I called it MyB—it stands for Mycelium and Beeswax,” she said. “It was basically a compound that I created to clear oil spills in Dallas-Fort Worth areas and hopefully soon, across the world.”

Dallas support 

For the first time this year, the Texas Workforce Commission awarded GEMS a grant, but the organization is primarily funded through private foundations and corporate partners like Charles Schwab, Texas Instruments, CBRE, and Cummins. Milton said being based in Dallas is an advantage.

“Dallas is such a hub for innovation and, you know, so many headquarters and corporate centers of excellence are here,” she said.

What started as her classroom observation in 2010 has quietly grown into a movement that’s helping girls open their eyes to futures they may not have considered—girls who, like Marenah, are creating solutions to problems that extend far beyond a classroom on SMU’s campus.

Voices contributor Nicole Ward is a data journalist for the Dallas Regional Chamber.

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