By Piper Rutherford | Staff Writer
The Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science offers underrepresented minorities with a database of job opportunities, internships, research grants and graduate programs from different universities across the country, all in one workshop.
SACNAS President and Ontario, Canada, junior Alexsa Benedito said that the mission of SACNAS is to show underrepresented minorities on campus that they are welcome in the field of mathematics and science.
“This society is a great place for students that fit this description to find someone who either comes from a similar background or might have a similar passion as them in the [STEM] field,” Benedito said. “We hope that with this community and the resources we provide our members that students will form a community of future scientists that support one another.”
Benedito said part of this network includes a large database for students to learn about opportunities in the STEM field that are available to them without having to deal with the hassle of doing their own research.
“Our executive team was lucky enough this past October to attend SACNAS’ annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona,” Benedito said. “Lots of big schools, including Yale, Harvard Medical School and Stanford, each had their own booths to pass out flyers and pamphlets about different summer research internships, clinical assistant positions, MCAT prep courses, as well as different job offerings from big companies, like NASA and Johnson and Johnson, and pharmaceutical brands, like Merck and Pfizer.”
According to Benedito, part of the motivation to attend the event is that her team knows how daunting it can be for students to look into the different programs that universities offer or seeing what scholarships they are eligible to apply for.
“In the future, we hope to host more workshops like this because of how much it has helped SACNAS students,” Benedito said. “We also want to offer more help in areas like resume building and how students can improve their application before submitting it to these graduate programs, jobs and internships.”
Benedito said that she is currently using this database to find internships for this coming summer.
“I am a health science major, so I need an internship before graduating,” Benedito said. “In the past, I have volunteered with clinical and surgical shadowing at an orthopedic practice, but in the future I hope to get an internship in either gynecology, anesthesiology or dermatology, which the database has narrowed down for me.”
Similarly, Waco senior and SACNAS Co-treasurer Joaquin Lugo, who was in attendance at the Phoenix conference, said that he was able to use the resources that SACNAS provided to apply to different Ph.D. and post-baccalaureate programs.
“At the conference there were a lot of laboratories in attendance, so I had the chance to meet with Genentech to learn more about toxicology — which is what I am interested in — while speaking with one of their representatives,” Lugo said. “I also just finished applying to different Ph.D. programs, like John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health.”
As for Lugo’s advice for those getting ready to apply to programs like these, he said that they should take advantage of the resources that SACNAS was able to collect and compile.
“As someone who has experience with going through countless websites to look for programs, I know that it is tedious and takes a lot of time,” Lugo said. “That is why I encourage individuals interested in post-baccalaureate STEM programs to take advantage of SACNAS’ resources.”
