Are Hispanics America's Next Great STEM Innovators?

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Permalink Reply by Janelle Meraz Hooper on November 26, 2011 at 10:13am

Ricardo, thank you for sharing this. I'm puzzled about our failure--across the board--in getting students interested in STEM. There's a missing link somewhere. Using myself as an example, I spent summers as a child dissecting my grandmother's flowers with a paring knife from the kitchen, studying the stars, collecting sea shells, and scouring the fields for geodes. I got good grades in high school biology. I would have been the perfect candidate to steer toward STEM. But no one noticed me. Was it because I was Hispanic? I don't know. Now, at 67 years old, I have stacks of books on anthropology, archaeology, marine science, and ornithology. I've been a docent in two very large museums. I still collect rocks and sea shells although I've given up collecting insects...can't bear to kill them. Where did I go wrong? Where did the educational system go wrong? Where do the parents go wrong? I add this last question because I failed to get my own child interested in science. She collected rocks, sea shells, and insects but at about eleven she was done. Why? She was a bright kid, courted by John Hopkins, and yet she wanted none of it. She got a history degree. Why, why, why? Janelle Meraz Hooper

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Permalink Reply by John Acevedo on November 26, 2011 at 1:47pm

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I think I can tell you why, 2 reasons mainly;

1. We as Hispanics still don’t know how to prepare ourselves in our college resume building years to get noticed by colleges so we can get in the core STEM schools.  This statement is true for our children as well. We see countless bright Hispanic students fizzle out into mediocrity due to lack of knowledge of how the educational system works in the states. If they only had more information on what the schools are lloking for and how to put that into their resumes I guarantee we would see a change in the numbers.
2. We as Hispanics don’t have the knowledge and much less the skills to know how the financial system works in the states. We are far too dependent on our weekly paycheck and don’t know how to save our money nor how to protect what we have fought tooth and nail for mainly our homes and business. Due to this we see ourselves as the group hardest hit by the recession.

All this affects our ability to pay for the good schools.

 

John Acevedo

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