Mariana Rocha

Growing up, the majority of my role models were immigrants: my parents, my cousin who was the first person in my extended family to go to college and my high school teachers. One individual that profoundly influenced my trajectory was Mr. Manriquez, my first and second year high school math teacher at Watsonville High. Math had always been my favorite subject, as an immigrant whose first language was not English, I enjoyed how universal it was. That passion and interest transferred to the rest of my high school courses, putting me at the top of my class and soon enough I began to see college as a tangible dream. My junior year, as part of the Watsonville Ivy League Project(WILP), I got a better sense of this dream and what it took to achieve it. The summer after my junior year, Mr. Manriquez emailed me urging me to apply to QuestBridge, a program that matches outstanding students from low-income backgrounds with top universities. I applied, and received my first college acceptance the fall semester of my senior year to Yale University.

As the first person in my family to attend college, I realized the immense opportunity I had in front of me. My experiences as part of ETech Academy, MESA and Robotics Club at Watsonville High piqued my interest in science, which I carried with me to college. I sought out opportunities to get involved in different research fields, working in laboratories at Yale and the NIH until I found my niche. I found that as a first-generation and low-income Latinx woman in science, there was a large disconnect between the academic spaces I sought to occupy and the community that had raised me. To me, my science cannot just be science, it has to draw from my life experiences. I decided on neuroscience, specifically looking at how environmental factors, such as socio-economic status, can alter mental health outcomes. Fall 2021, I am enrolling in Emory University’s Neuroscience PhD program, where I plan on studying the effects of pesticides, toxins that are heavily used in agricultural cities like Watsonville, on development of the brain and how exposure to these chemicals may have harmful consequences for learning abilities later in life.

The most rewarding experience of my life so far has been getting my first first-author scientific article accepted for publication to a medical journal March 2021. Beyond the tremendous honor of having my work be seen and approved by senior neuroscientists, this publication demonstrated my perseverance in this field. I completed the work for this project my senior year, after having to take a leave of absence 2018-2019 to recover from a bone-marrow transplant to cure Aplastic Anemia, a rare disorder that causes bone marrow failure. Returning to Yale after this disease was challenging, especially given how physically and mentally rigorous Science research can be. I had to find a way to make space in science that accommodated my new needs. Drawing from the support of my family and my mentors, I was able to complete my senior thesis project, submit it for publication and present it at the SACNAS conference for which I received a Best Poster Award. This milestone has propelled me forward with a bigger goal to fully celebrate all my identities and redefine the paradigm of what a good scientist should be. My hope is to encourage more young women from the PVUSD community to bring their perspective into the sciences.