Mentor Meej Kim, right, and Isabel Zavaleta at the annual poster session and celebration.
This summer, 20 high schoolers from the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) spent their free time working in UCSF labs on scientific research and learning about the college application process as part of the UCSF Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) High School Summer Internship Program.
In its 19th year, the program culminated in the annual poster session and celebration, a science fair-type event attended by interns and their families and representatives from UCSF, SFUSD, Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s office and Assemblywoman Fiona Ma’s office.
Fostering engagement in all facets of activities at UCSF to strengthen partnerships between the campus and the community is among the recommendations outlined in the UCSF Strategic Plan. That plan, released in June 2007, specifically calls on the University to serve the local, regional and global communities.
The High School Summer Internship Program, one of many UCSF-SFUSD partnerships through SEP, targets SFUSD high school juniors who have a strong curiosity about science and meet the program’s “critical difference” criteria, which require an indication that the internship will make a significant difference in the student’s life.
In many cases, interns are the first in their families to consider going to college. This year, only five interns reported a history of college attendance in their families.
“This program is really different from other programs because we’re not taking star students,” said Andrew Grillo-Hill, academic coordinator for SEP. “We’re reaching out to those students who are really on the edge.”
Of the nearly 100 students who have participated in the program since 2000, at least 92 percent have since enrolled in college, and 70 percent of these have completed or are working toward science degrees.
Intern Janee Johnson of Leadership Charter High School asserted that the program changed her entire view on choosing a career. “The whole time [in the program] I was thinking, in the back of my head, I have to help people. I have to do something in a medical field,” said Johnson, who had previously wanted to become a lawyer. “I’d like to find cures and solutions for problems. In the medical field, you know you’re helping people because you see the results firsthand.”
After a competitive selection process, interns are paired with UCSF volunteer mentors – graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, researchers, professional students and other campus educators – who design a research project for their interns. The eight-week program requires a minimum of 180 hours of lab work and Wednesday college workshops, which cover college application processes, financial aid and essay writing. The group visited University of California, Davis this summer.
Meej Kim, a pharmaceutical sciences and pharmacogenomics graduate student and mentor, noted that her intern, Isabel Zavaleta, “was pretty impressive in terms of being able to absorb so much information with only a couple years of high school science. She was able to just pick up stuff that I started doing only a year ago.”
Kim added that watching Zavaleta explain advanced scientific research with poise and confidence was one of the most rewarding aspects of the program, a sentiment not uncommon among its participants.
“I learned a lot more than experience in a lab this summer,” echoed intern Fernando Elvira. “At first, I was very intimidated by all the technology that was involved because I thought that the moment I would touch it, I would break it. But as I got used to everything, I became more confident. I learned that I shouldn’t doubt myself because if I work hard at my goals, there is no doubt I can make them happen.”
A National Model
Housed in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, SEP is nationally recognized as a model partnership between a university and a local public school system. Since 1989, SEP has been awarded nearly $9 million in competitive federal, private and state awards. The program boasts 85 percent to 90 percent participation from SFUSD schools.
SEP is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Science Education Partnership Award from the National Center for Research Resources, the Bechtel Foundation, the UCSF Chancellor’s Office, the UCSF School of Medicine and the California Science Project.
The High School Summer Internship Program is sponsored by an undergraduate science outreach grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a private grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
“We hope that our internship program can serve as a model for other groups at UCSF developing internship programs and as a national model for joining laboratory internships with college preparation programs for high school students,” said Grillo-Hill.
Photos by Susan Merrell
