UC San Diego summer program seeks to diversify the next generation of scientists – NBC 7 San Diego

This summer is for science. The Research Methodology Training Laboratory is UC San Diego’s two- to five-week summer program for middle and high schoolers. Every local student has a goal and a person who got them started.

“I want to go into neurosurgery,” Yena Fanta, a rising junior at The Preuss School, said. “My counselor was the one that introduced me to this program.”

Aaron Pantaleon, a rising freshman at O’Farrell Charter School, has family ties.

“My grandpa was a microbiologist in the Navy, so I was always curious because I never knew what it was back then,” Pantaleon said. “So now I’m trying to get a better view of what he did in the field and all the different things he saw.”

The goal of the program is to boost minorities in STEM fields.

“If it’s not us, who’s then going to go into the community,” asked Eduardo Fricovsky, program director and UCSD clinical pharmacy professor. “When you look at the community and how poor overall, the health of the community is, it’s because there’s a lack of minority doctors and pharmacists and nurses within those communities.”

Fricovsky didn’t have much growing up in San Diego when he joined the program as a student in 1994.

“I went to Gompers when it was a secondary school,” he said. “It was rough times. There were so many other bad things students could get involved with.”

Now, 30 years later, the program remains his chance to show success from a different lens.

“It’s a firsthand experience of people telling me I can’t do it,” Fanta said. “And then I do it just to prove to them that they’re wrong.”

You can read more about the academy and how to get involved here.