By Laura Bautista
“Sabe sonar en grande. You can dream big as long as you are willing to work hard to convert that dream into reality,” said keynote speaker Jose M. Hernandez, an astronaut at NASA, who spoke as a part of the STEM Connect-ion High School Expo that took place at Riverside City College on May 9.
Hernandez was speaking to the high school and college students alongside faculty members about his life story of growing up as a migrant farm worker to becoming an astronaut at NASA.
At the age of ten years old, Hernandez decided on becoming an astronaut on the day the last Apollo mission happened in 1972. He watched Eugene Cernan be the last man to walk on the moon. “That’s where I’m from,” Hernandez said. “I want to be like that guy. I want to be an astronaut.”
After telling his father of his dream, his father gave him advice on how to reach that goal. “‘Define your goal. Recognize how far you are from it. Create a road map to get there.’” Hernandez’s father said. “‘Education is key, develop a strong ethic, and persevere. Never give up,’” Hernandez’s father said.
Hernandez applied and was rejected 11 times by NASA. He was on the verge of giving up after the six rejections until his wife encouraged him to continue applying. “‘I don’t know what they have that you don’t have,’” His wife said.
Hernandez looked at the other applicants to see what he needed to become applicable and found out that they were all pilots and scuba divers. He went and became a pilot and scuba diver all to meet those requirements. He took a five year project to travel to Russia five to six times a year, three to four weeks at a time to travel to sunny Siberia, a project that Hernandez stated, “that no one wanted.”
After that project, he sent out his twelfth application and was accepted. Hernandez was introduced into the 19th class of astronauts. At the age of 47 he achieved his dream and he went up into space. The mission he was assigned was the second to last mission to finish construction of the International Space Station with seven tons of equipment to deliver. “Whenever you pick a goal, make sure you enjoy the journey because that’s about 80- 90 percent of your time and effort,” Hernandez said.
The STEM Connect-ion Expo was designed for high school students who are interested in STEM. Luis Molina, who is in charge of the STEM grants said, “The college has two big federal grants in the STEM division that I helped manage with Dr. Virginia White.”
“One is with the National Science Foundation and the other is through the Department of Education. So having those two federally funded grants really help us to be able to have funding to do these types of events,” Molina said.
Molina mentions that through these grants there are a lot of things they want and have to do for underrepresented students in STEM. The departments are: Financial Aid, Student Services and clubs who help out with introducing the high school students to the services at RCC.
There were eight high schools who participated including high schools from Riverside Unified School District and Jurupa Unified School District. “RCC is a city college,” Molina stated. “We welcome everyone.”
“I have been teaching for almost 20 years teaching at RCC and I don’t remember us in STEM in any way doing direct outreach to recruit students here,” said Virginia White, a Professor for the Biology Department at RCC.
“We wanted to do an outreach event to get faculty to be able to talk to students where we have all these different resources that the college offers,” White said.
