A group of local high school students have ditched the lazy summer days and instead are testing hypotheses and conducting their own scientific research inside the University of San Diego’s labs.
Aleyda Lopez is an incoming Junior at Hoover High School and she already knows what she wants to be when she grows up.
“I want to be a medical scientist,” Lopez says.
So, to get a head start on that career, she’s spending her summer testing a hypothesis, one step at a time, then comes the part every scientist knows, waiting for the results.
“That's what makes every day coming excited to class, seeing what we're able to work with,” Lopez says.
Down the hall other students are getting their own hands-on lesson in physics, testing waves and seeing what happens when they change different variables.
“I want them to understand like why we're doing those things and why we're why we're doing those techniques and analyzing the research in certain ways,” Whitney Ryan, Physics and Biophysics Professor at USD says.
And that’s really the point of this two-week summer research experience.
The Ocean Discovery Institute has partnered with USD for three summers now, giving students from City Heights the chance to do something they may not otherwise get to do in high school: Real research.
The program is free, and nearly 100 students have now had the chance to work alongside USD faculty and researchers.
“It turns that peephole imagery of what you think Science, Physics or Biology is, and just connects them and brings them together to show them that they can use those tools to impact the world around them,” Ryan says.
For Lopez, there’s another reason this experience matters. She’s setting her sights on a career in science, a field where women have historically been underrepresented.
But she says she doesn’t see that as a reason to think any smaller.
“I feel like that's much of a mentality,” Lopez says. “We can both achieve what we want to be.”
She’s already testing the Science, and challenging the stereotypes that come with it.
