A great fellowship for recent PhD graduates to have positive impact with science and add diversity to your experience

Towards the end of my Ph.D. program, I was looking for a postdoc position in research. This was the most conventional path, even though I felt a little lost what I wanted to follow as postdoc research. When I saw the recruitment for the SC fellowship, I thought that it offered everything that I wanted at the moment. I wanted to recenter myself again, as a person and as a scientist - I needed some space to reflect on how I want to live the next chapter of my personal and professional paths. I wanted to do some good with science - I needed some reassurance that science was not only a selfish ambition but it could really empower people with logic and skills. I wanted to do something different - I needed some time to be outside the competitive academic environment and go out into the world to enjoy other aspects of life. What could be more perfect than teaching science at a high school in a remote and beautiful island of the Philippines for 6 months with every expense paid? Thus, I chose the SC fellowship over another postdoc at a prestigious institute - for me at that moment, the SC fellowship had much more to offer!
The biggest surprise for me was how receptive and appreciative my students were at CVIF! Before joining CVIF, I had a vague idea of how teaching science to high school students would be like. However, when I first stood in front of the class, with chalk in my hand and a blackboard behind my back, and I saw the twinkling eyes of 120 high school students, I realized that I was in the real world! I could be - when a student looks back into her/his high school period - that teacher who inspired her/him to pursue STEM. These students from this remote and beautiful village had high hopes for their future, and they really appreciated someone from an outer world coming to help them achieve their dreams. They had interesting science questions, and most of them worked very hard to absorb what I could offer as a recent Ph.D. graduate. For example, I gave the students in Grade 11 to do a science communication project along with the qualitative research, and I was amazed at what creativity the students came up with! They made posters, magazine/newspaper articles, and produced cartoon videos, vlogs, radio news to communicate their results with the general public.
Completing the Science Corps fellowship did shape my idea about my professional future - that I miss research! I realized teaching is a difficult job. It requires the skills of communication, persistence, and most importantly a huge amount of patience. I also had to be sensitive to the perspective of the students - their environment and condition. All these skills forgotten during my Ph.D. could be evaluated and polished during this fellowship, as teaching gave immediate feedback. I could also keep some research aspects during the fellowship, by developing activity sheets for Dynamic Learning and organizing a workshop for local scientists on the Computational Methods in Biology.
My most important takeaway from the experience was that STEM does empower people with logic and skills! I was so glad to see how serious the students were, especially the female students, in learning programming. I imagined how these skills would change their future - both in their mind and in the real world.