One-on-One Power
Discovering engineering potential in at-risk students
By Mark Matthews
As a role model for striving community college students, Amelito Enriquez would be hard to beat. Raised poor on the outskirts of Manila, he attended a school lacking toilets and so short of materials that teachers padded year-end inventories by splitting textbooks in two. The first from his school to enter the University of the Philippines, Enriquez tested badly in English for lack of vocabulary. He went on to earn a master’s in geodetic science at Ohio State and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Irvine.
Yet for people like Roozbeh Parsa, Enriquez represents more than the can-do immigrant. In more than 19 years of teaching engineering and math at Cañada Community College in Redwood City, Calif., Enriquez has worked inventively and empathetically to make the two-year school a pathway to success, helping students like Parsa overcome the barriers of language or weak preparation, securing routes into four-year degree programs, and enlivening classes with humor.
Parsa, who enrolled at Cañada after immigrating with his family in 1998, was among the students whose testimony helped win Enriquez a 2011 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. Guided by Enriquez from enrollment through after-class labs and internships and ultimately to a four-year degree from Berkeley, Parsa ended up with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford and a job at Texas Instruments. “I believe a big part of who I am and who I want to be . . . comes from the excellent mentorship I received from Dr. Enriquez,” he wrote.
America Sanchez, who entered Cañada as a 28-year-old single mother, described how Enriquez helped her get back on track after she flunked a materials exam. “If you can’t come to the study sessions of the classes you’re taking, you can come to the other ones I have for the other classes I’m teaching, and if you can’t make it to those, you can bring your daughter,” he told her. She eventually earned an engineering degree from San Jose State.
If community colleges draw many at-risk students – those who require substantial remedial help or who must juggle job, family, and school – they have one advantage over their higher-budget, higher-cost state universities, Enriquez says: smaller class sizes, which allow for more one-on-one engagement between student and instructor. Combined with a student’s determination – “I want to call it grit” – this personalized support yields surprises. “I have seen students with a weak natural aptitude make it and become successful,” Enriquez says. “Now I don’t have the guts to tell anyone they don’t have what it takes.”
Besides individual coaching, Enriquez has brought in federal money to institutionalize and strengthen support both for entering students and for those aspiring to transfer, particularly minorities and women. With San Francisco State, he launched a two-week, residential Summer Engineering Institute offering a mix of skills training, hands-on laboratory activities, field trips, workshops, panels, and projects, and a 10-week summer research internship for exploring earthquake engineering, circuit design for biomedical applications, and embedded systems design.
Enriquez led a team that pioneered Math Jam, a between-semester course designed to help students score better in placement tests so they can fulfill requirements in less time. Recently, he has worked to identify specific parts of the curriculum where students are likely to stumble so they don’t have to repeat a whole course. “Students will do well for three quarters of a semester and then get stuck. We make them repeat everything they’ve done. It’s a waste of resources,” he says.
Enriquez found his niche in teaching only after joining Cañada. He originally took the job, spurning research offers, to remain in the Bay Area with David Childers, who has been his partner for 21 years and, since 2008, his spouse. By now, he says, “I cannot think of myself being at another job.” Any fleeting doubt is erased by Facebook updates from former students like Joy Franco, who was fixing bikes for a living when she entered Cañada. On Valentine’s Day, she messaged that she had been accepted into engineering graduate programs at Stanford, Cornell, and the University of Minnesota.
Mark Matthews is editor of Prism.
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