Community & Business
3 July, 2026
Mareeba High first at camp
ONE of Mareeba State High’s brightest was one of just three regional students in the state to attend the recent STEM Girl Power Camp in Brisbane.
Only 60 students from across Queensland were selected for the week-long camp, with Kahlia Sellers not only one of just three regional students in attendance but also Mareeba High’s first ever representative at the event.
Mareeba High’s head of science Jason Richardson said it was a pretty big deal for Kahlia to be selected for the camp.
“We have had students apply for this one quite a few times and she’s the first one we’ve actually got into it,” he said.
“She’s definitely a very high quality student and does a lot of extracurricular activities. I think these camps are a really great experience for these kids to leave our regional area and go see what’s out there.”
The camp is designed to expose students to the many possible career pathways within the field of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and provides them with networking opportunities with experts from those fields.
Students met inspiring role models from diverse fields and explored pathways through activities such as robotics, quantum technologies, biodiversity, and biomedical research.
Kahlia said she enjoyed visiting the Translational Research Institute as well as the Integrated Pathology Learning Centre, where she observed an array of preserved human organs ranging from healthy to diseased.
But her favourite activity during the trip was visiting the University of Queensland’s (UQ) St Lucia campus, where she toured facilities and classrooms and even had a talk from a quantum physics professor, which was “very, very cool”.
“I got to ask a lot of questions and I met a lot of cool people who either study or teach at the university. We also got to see a quite famous experiment called the pitch drop experiment,” Kahlia said.
The pitch drop experiment at UQ is the world’s longest-running laboratory experiment, which demonstrates how some everyday materials can look and feel like solids but are actually highly viscous, slow-flowing liquids.
The experiment was started in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell and has since seen just nine drops occur, with the last being in April 2014.
Now a 2026 STEM Ambassador, Kahlia will organise and deliver a STEM event during national science week (August) to inspire other students to pursue a career within the fields.
