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‘Bad’ O.C. student wins $100,000 science fellowship
May 25th, 2009, 5:19 pm · 35 Comments · posted by Gary Robbins, science writer-editor
Carmen J. Cortez of Lynwood received her bachelor's degree over the weekend from Cal State Fullerton
A young woman who reportedly was told by a high school math teacher that she’d have trouble getting into college to study biology because “you’re just not a good student” has been awarded a $101,500 federal fellowship to conduct research and pursue a doctorate at UC Davis.
Carmen J. Cortez of Lynwood earned a bachelor’s degree in biological science over the weekend from Cal State Fullerton. This fall, she’ll begin studying ecology at UC Davis, building on research that she’s done in Ghana, Mexico and California’s Sierra Nevada.
Cortez, 23, was awarded the money by the National Science Foundation after she flourished at Cal State Fullerton with help from the university’s McNair Scholarship Program, which provides support and encouragement to promising students.
She explained her goals in a university advisory, saying “I want to work with sustainable agriculture and conservation and bring in indigenous practices of agriculture. I want to help find a way to conserve the environment in a way that is just and fair to the people who live there.
“We are all in a rapidly changing world — a world in which those who are in power seek to homogenize society and are, unfortunately, those who perpetuate a system that continues to exploit people and our natural resources. In this changing world, there needs to be a different outlook to the co-existence of our civilizations and natural process of the environment.”
Other O.C. academic news …
- Chapman gets $3 million gift in honor of its Nobel laureate
- Price of going to CSUF rose 113% in one decade
- O.C. ranks high in adults with bachelor’s degrees
- Donor gives new UCI law school $2 million gift
- UCI gets mixed review in US News rankings
- UCI makes dubious claim about its new law school
- UCI’s biggest feeder high schools not located in
Did you miss …
- New evidence suggests sea turtles live in Seal Beach waters year-round
- NEW: Photo of O.C. from space, taken in 1991
- VIDEO: World’s largest airship flies over Seal Beach
- VIDEO: Famed physicist Paul Davies talks science and religion at Chapman
- Stunning photograph of shuttle Atlantis ‘crossing’ the sun
- Bus-size humpback whales return to O.C. waters
- Rarely seen B-1 bomber soars high off Seal Beach coast
- Chapman student getting degree 30 years late
- La Nina ends, possibly clearing way for a wet winter in O.C.
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A “young women”
She’s done Ghana?
Come on! Doesn’t anyone proof read anymore?
Thanks for pointing out the mistakes. I’ve corrected them.
I love it when discouraging educational timeservers get proven wrong.
While I congratulate her, I find her thesis dismaying. Sounds like she’s more interested in pop-culture anti-science than in true agricultural progress. Having an anticorporate political agenda is fine, but don’t cloak it in environmental rhetoric. Modern science has transformed agriculture from an inefficient pittance into a technological wonder that feeds billions more than her “indigenous” practices could have ever hoped. A study of Nobel Prize winning agriculturist Norman Borlaug would do Ms. Cortez much good.
Editor’s note: Brian hosts the wonderful skeptoid.com podcast. I’m not supporting or dissing his comment on Cortez. Just saying that if you haven’t checked out Skeptoid, try it out.
Political activism trumping scientific progress: Only in liberal academia would such a silly thesis be rewarded.
Hopefully that math teacher will hear of her success and think twice before dumping on any more of his or her students.
Maybe at the time the math teacher said that she wasn’t a good student. Maybe it was the motivation she needed to “prove him wrong”. It’s called tough love?
No teacher has the right to put ANY student down!! My 3rd teacher told me I would never get into college. It continued into High School because I am dyslexic and have had many obstacles to over come. Well, I not only went to college but am a District Attorney and graduated with honors from college. You students who have teachers or parents that tell them you can’t, take it as a mission to prove these people wrong. Show them YOU ARE somebody who can make that difference.
Yep. Teachers should be fired on-the-spot for discouraging students from striving for their dreams. If you don’t want to speak encouraging words to a student, then just educate and shut your mouth. We have enough naysayers outside of school as it is.
Unfortunately, that will never get done. There is a thing called the Teachers union that prevents bad teachers from getting fired. If you get rid of the bad teachers, then the union has that many fewer people paying union dues into it. So the aim is not to make the teachers better, but to be bad so that they have to hire more teachers to get the job done. Thus getting more union dues being paid to the union.
Congratulations Shanice. I taught at Cal State Long Beach a few years ago and had a dyslexic student. She was the hardest working student I’ve ever had. Determination, and a few kind words, will take a person a long way in life.
Correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t these stories posted onto the website directly by the writer and not proof read by an editor or proofreader? The writer is the proofreader?
Virata: In most cases, that’s correct. We’ve had so many lay-offs that each employee has taken on more work. From time to time, I make mistakes. Readers point them out. I correct them immediately. I guess that makes the reader the copyeditor, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It brings me into contact with more people. And that’s what this is all about — connecting with the public.
Microsoft Word has a spell check feature and a grammar check feature. You could write your stories in Word while having these features turned on and you wouldn’t have as many mistakes due to spelling or grammar (it is not 100% perfect, but it would help a lot).
Back in the early 70’s my 9th grade Biology teacher at Santa Ana Valley High did the same thing to me. Mr Vickers was his name. He was a young teacher and I really don’t think he had much experience at inspiring his students at that time.
Hey! Don’t let those mean teachers bring you down.
The teachers that treat their students bad are forgotten, and good teachers are remembered even after they move on to a better life.
I bet that there is more good teachers that we can remember than bad teachers that are bitter.
I had the same experience.
Congrats to Miss Cortez from an alumni.
It’s quite tough to finish a B.S from CSUF in Biology AND got a scholarship to pursue a doctorate. The main reason is that the professors from CSUF are terrible.
I also agree with a comment about mixing hard science with politics.
Goodman: If CSUF has so many bad teachers how does it turn out so many good students?
I hope that high school science teacher read about her accomplishment. Maybe there was some tough love, maybe that person was just plain wrong. Reminds me.,. my high school guidance counselor tried to discourage me from applying to an Ivy League college, I had the grades and the scores, but no one from that mediocre place was encouraged to reach for the stars. I went Ivy, graduated, and never looked back.
> has been awarded a $101,500 federal fellowship to conduct research and pursue a doctorate at UC Davis.
English translation: She’s been hired as a slave by UC Davis and if she’s lucky, they will eventually grant her doctoral degree. She would be wise to tell them where to stick the $101,500 and enter private business with her fiery spirit and start earning experience, for as soon as she is granted that PHD, she will be virtually unemployable.
Check the US Department of Labor Statistics. Most people with a doctorate are highly employable and typically earn far more than the average worker, wether they’re in the public or private sector. It’s also true that people with college degrees, on average, tend to find a new job twice as quickly as those who don’t have one when there’s a recession that throws a lot of people out of work.
Ms. Cortez hasn’t been hired as a slave. She’s been given money to help her work toward a doctorate. And yes, it involves a tremendous amount of work. Which is the way it should be.
I meant to write whether instead of wether. Guess it’s time for me to go back to school.
Isn’t Jay Leno dyslexic? Weren’t Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison considered “bad” students?
I’m happy for this fine young woman and glad that she had the guts and belief in herself to overcome her teacher’s discouragement. Good for her!
I wish Carmen great sucess in her career path. Proving yourself against the oppositing of instructors or peers is the foundation of leadership. She could be the future Secrectary of Agriculture. The beauty of web publishing is the ability to edit in real-time and inexpensively, as opposed to hardcopy. I never went to college, electing to join the navy in 1972. Navy “A” school cleared up the mysteries of trigonometry, although, I did well in higschool algebra. I was making spreadsheets, using pencil, paper, and calculator, back in the early 1980’s, long before teaching myself to use MS-Excel, in 1996. I enjoy exercising my aging brain, with algebra and spreadsheets. I designed a graphic last week, that the casual observer won’t appreciate as much as the math major, due to the relative scale of percentage between bars in a chart. The challenge of the thought process was most rewarding. Education is a constant quest for answers.
I was once told by my high school counselor that I’d be a failure and not to even consider college. After graduating from Claremont Men’s College in 1975, I retired at 39, multi millionaire at 30. Glad I didn’t listen to her!!!
Stay with your dreams and don’t let others discourage you.
It’s good to see people succeed. It shows alot of class to not mention the high school she went to, but it would have been a great boost to the school to mention it anyway.
It’s great to see the writer of an article correct mistakes. You definitely don’t get that with a regular newspaper and won’t once they stop producing them on a daily basis. Nice job.
Are these scholarships merit-based, or based
on her ancestry or sex?
You have to doubt qualifications when affirmative action exists.
The scholarships are merit based.
I did not mean to generalize the whole CSUF. I was talking about science-related departments of CSUF.
However, I also do not agree with the statement that good professors produce good students. That might work at high school level but not college.
One of the main things that I had learned from my favorite professors, Dr. Joel D. Weintraub, was to look at the statistics critically. Science students from CSUF have a hard time getting into any good graduate schools. Go ahead and ask those science departments for data.
That’s why I praise Miss Cortez for getting into a doctorate program with a scholarship with it.
There are a lot of Cal State Fullerton students pursuing doctorates at UC Irvine.
CSUF students get into medical school at UCI? CSUF students get into PhD. program for Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineeringor, Math at UCI?
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. But, yes, students who have been undergrads at Cal State Fullerton have gone on to thrive in all of the programs you mentioned. No surprise there. CSUF turns out a lot of very, very good students.
I would like to know why Gary Robbins the Science Dude is doing articles on education???? It doesn’t make sense.
I’m writing higher ed stories in addition to science because our company has had a series of lay-offs which has left us with fewer people to cover all of the things we need to cover.