When Rebecca Price first enrolled at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI), she went in with a tentative plan to get her associate’s degree in business administration. But by the time she left her student orientation, she had changed her mind. Inspired by what she heard about the science department, including NASA-funded projects and student internships, Price chose to go in a completely different direction. She decided then and there to pursue a dual major in pre-engineering and AutoCAD, which meant getting her computer-aided drafting and design certificate. “It’s a strong major at SIPI,” says Price. “It’s very hard to get that AutoCAD certificate of completion anywhere else.”
Now in her second and final year of the program, Price will be finished in the fall, and plans to pursue a BS in civil engineering and then possibly attend law school to become an intellectual property lawyer. “It’s kind of unbelievable, but it’s a great feeling knowing that you can accomplish something that you set your mind to,” she says. “I feel like I do have the mind to be an engineer. I have a lot of imagination. I love the way that I think — I’m an objective thinker.”
Price is currently working in the advanced technical education department as part of the VIP ROSE STEM internship, which is funded by NASA. (For more on this and other programs at SIPI, see the article on page 26.) She is the product manager on the augmented reality sandbox project at SIPI. “We have to build a sandbox that we use as a visualization tool, to display topography and different levels of elevation by means of contour lines,” she explains. “You can interact with it physically. There’s so much that you can learn, or you can teach a group of students with the augmented reality sandbox.”
STEM education has had a huge impact on Price, and she wants to pay it forward for her community. “I think there should be stronger influences in STEM on the reservation,” she says.
Before this project, Price was a part of the rocket team, where she had the opportunity to go to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. “It was pretty amazing, because we got to build a huge rocket payload,” she says. There were teams from many other schools in addition to SIPI, and all the payloads were stacked onto each other and put into the rocket vessel to be launched.
Price says that through her internship, her interactions with the other interns, and her work with mentors at SIPI, she has learned a lot about how to be a leader. “When I join a team, I focus on how well I can contribute to the team,” she says.
Price grew up with her mother in Phoenix. In her school district, she was one of a small number — only 2 percent — of Native American students. “The district really wanted me to be with the class every year, so I got a lot of help with making sure that I passed the AIMS [Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards] test,” recalls Price. “If I had been raised on the reservation, I probably wouldn’t have been challenged that much every year growing up.” She cites her mom as the driving force behind her continued success in school. “She always made sure that I was getting my homework done at the Boys and Girls Club. She always wanted me to get my tutoring done, and if I ever had questions, to ask my teachers or my tutors. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been in school. I’ve always been trying to get every problem down.”
STEM education has had a huge impact on Price, and she wants to pay it forward for her community. “I think there should be stronger influences in STEM on the reservation,” she explains. “There should be more robotics in the reservation high schools, even more people teaching robotics, or playing with robots in elementary school or kindergarten. I think it would be really awesome for the youth to be introduced to STEM.”
In addition to more members of the Navajo Nation, Price would also like to see more women in STEM. “As a Navajo woman, I think it would be cool to see more women who want to go to college coming to SIPI,” she says.
Always determined, Price has worked hard to establish an AISES chapter at SIPI, and encouraged several fellow students to join AISES. The next step, she says, is to hold an election for AISES student officials and submit research proposals for the 2017 AISES National Conference in Denver. She adds, “A lot of teachers and smart friends of mine tell me, ‘You can do anything you want, as long as you put your mind to it.’ That’s completely 100 percent true.”
