When he graduated from high school, Roberto Tinoco didn’t really know what his options were for further education. Tinoco, whose family emigrated from Mexico to California when he was a child, had a 1-year-old daughter to support. “I was a young dad. I had all these responsibilities at home, and a lot of people told me that maybe I should give up school so that I could support my family,” Tinoco remembers. So he found a job as a check-cashing teller. The business’s owner had once been a minority-mentoring coordinator at the University of California (UC), Davis, and she believed Tinoco had potential. “She helped me realize that I still had to take care of my education and that there are opportunities out there for me,” Tinoco says.

With his boss’s encouragement, Tinoco enrolled as a biology major at Mt. San Antonio College, a 2-year school in Walnut, California. After 2 years of studying hard, getting laboratory experience, and working full-time, he applied to six UC campuses and was accepted by all of them. “I was amazed at the level of recruitment these universities have at community colleges,” he says. He chose UC Irvine, persuaded largely by a minority scholarship offered through the university’s NSF-funded California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) program. Now a third-year Ph.D. student in viral immunology at UC San Diego, Tinoco advises students following a similar path to “stay focused on obtaining your goal and surround yourself with people who care about helping you in your education.”

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