If you are a first-generation college student — or will be soon — your world is about to expand in a number of ways. According to the Online Journal for Workforce Education and Development, approximately 50 percent of today’s college students are in proud, but uncharted, territory as the first in their family to attend a four-year college or university. Whether you’re getting ready to attend school on campus or online, it’s a big deal.

When Kathleen Jolivette first joined The Boeing Company in the early 2000s, she had little in common with her fellow interns. By the time she arrived at Boeing, Jolivette had spent eight years in the U.S. Army, already started a family, and obtained her undergraduate degree. “I was in my late 30s.” says Jolivette. “I always joked about being the oldest.”

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Dr. Serra Hoagland’s upbringing put her on a path to becoming the only Native woman with a PhD to work for the U.S. Forest Service. Growing up in Placerville, Calif., a small town west of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Dr. Hoagland just knew that she wanted to be outdoors. “My biggest thing was to finish my homework and go outside — that was my goal for the day,” recalls Dr. Hoagland, this year’s winner of the Most Promising Engineer or Scientist Award.

When Laura Smith-Velazquez was eight years old, her parents got her a telescope. The dark sky over Dorr, Mich., made for the perfect laboratory for Smith-Velazquez, an especially curious child. “I was fascinated with the sky,” she recalls. “It was so beautiful and I had so many questions.” 

One of Frances Dupris’ fondest childhood memories is having chicken pox. No, it wasn’t because the illness was fun. Rather, what she remembers with such nostalgia is that having chicken pox meant that she got to spend an extended period of time with her grandmother, Louise Eagle Tail Quick Bear, and great-grandmother, Rebecca Quick Bear, who took care of her while she was sick.

When Sandra Begay was an 11-year-old attending boarding school, she knew she wanted a career in engineering. It wasn’t that she was taking an engineering course in elementary school, but rather it was when she realized there was a problem that could be solved. 

When Brendan Kinkade was a young kid growing up in Oklahoma and Texas, he wanted to know how things work — a concept he now refers to as “practical physics.” At the time, though, the pursuit of practical physics translated into completely taking apart and then reassembling motorbike engines on his back patio. “Every screw and washer had a place, and if you deconstruct things, you have to know how they go back into place,” says Kinkade. “It taught me to be systematic and process-oriented. And to understand that there are many pieces that make up the whole.”

As a high school or college student, you may have been connected to AISES in any number of ways. Now, as a working professional, you may find it harder to keep those ties with the organization. One simple way to make sure you stay connected and involved — and support the AISES mission — is volunteering. There are many great ways to volunteer with AISES as a working professional. Here are just a few.

For the past three years Liam Puls was part of a small STEM school: the Oklahoma School of Innovation and Experiential Learning, in Bixby. He was in the school’s first class, with a cohort of only 15. Now, it has students from seventh to 11th grade. “We were able to do things that regular students don’t get to do, like travel to Peru and Boston, and visit companies like SpaceX and Boston Dynamics,” he says. “Amazing field trips!”

These days the lab where Kristina Gonzales-Wartz works is a very busy place. A biomedical scientist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Gonzales-Wartz has joined the Laboratory of Immunogenetics in Rockville, Md., on an urgent mission to develop monoclonal antibodies against COVID-19.