Last week, a lucky group of high-schoolers attended the Fox Chase Cancer Center Immersion Science Program at Esperanza College for a week of fun, facts, and fruit flies!
The week served as a “boot camp” to lab basics, where students conducted an experiment to see how junk food vs. healthy food effects the way fruit flies live and reproduce. This way, they saw the effect of diet on cell division in order to draw parallels between fruit fly and human genes.
Immersion Science Program Coordinator Dara Ruiz-Whalen and her colleagues helped students learn important lab skills such as precision, coordination, pipetting, and screening in order to create and monitor their lab experiments.
This is yet another way that Esperanza College teams up with our community partners in order to bring STEM to life for our Hispanic community. Providing access to resources and the opportunity to have fun while learning can increase the likelihood that our students will choose to enter STEM fields later in life. With an increasing population of young Hispanics and millions more becoming college-aged every year, we can help bring the United States back up to par in the global scientific community.