Hispanic Engineers Face Global Competition for Grad School

Last fall Jesús Medina was enthusiastic, optimistic and excited. He was starting his senior year at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) as a hardworking engineering student. The first in his family to go to college, he had spent the last two summers away from his immigrant parents i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Hispanic outlook in higher education 2014-04, Vol.24 (13), p.20
Main Author: Orchowski, Peggy Sands
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Access to education
Competition
Engineering
Graduate studies
Hispanic students
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Last fall Jesús Medina was enthusiastic, optimistic and excited. He was starting his senior year at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) as a hardworking engineering student. The first in his family to go to college, he had spent the last two summers away from his immigrant parents in Los Angeles to participate in a personalized, paid research mentoring graduate program at UCSB. Although high school and at UCSB, he had been supported by MESA, an organization mainly in the Southwest that mentors underrepresented minorities K-16 in mathematics, engineering and science achievement. Medina had happily given back by being an outreach fellow with the organization that in 2012 had been given UCSB's "most active club" award. The numbers out of UCSB College of Engineering bear out Medina' story. By December 2013, only four Latinos were admitted for the fall 2013-14 into UCSB's electrical and computer engineering graduate program, only one Latino had filed a "Statement of Intent to Register" (SIR). A total of 10 Latinos had been admitted to all five UCSB engineering grad programs (chemical, computer, electrical and computer engineering, materials and mechanical - where actually no Latinos had been accepted). A total of two SIRs from Latinos were listed by December 2013 in all those programs. "Latino students have to learn how to find their own resources," said Enrique Hernandez, director of the University of Texas at Austin's Equal Opportunity in Engineering Program (EOE) - a finalist in the "Examples of Excelencia 2013 Baccalaureate Level" awards. "I tell them that they should never have to pay for graduate school. But you have to do it yourself - the networking, the research, the applications for fellowships, research assistantships, papers co-authorships, paid internships and NSF partnerships and the like. It's not only a lot of work but it's a mindset. It starts and often ends at the academic department level."