When someone new comes over to our house, my parents drag out a video of me from the fourth or fifth grade. In the video, I introduce myself and tell everyone that my favorite subject in school is math.

I grew up in a high-crime area in suburban Baltimore. Violence, drugs, and alcoholism were rampant — a fertile recruiting ground for street gangs.

When Cristin Haase was first thinking about a career in dental health, the inequality in care available to American Indians was on her mind — she wanted to be one of the few Indigenous professionals working on closing that gap.

Mason Grimshaw never envisioned himself walking across the stage at his college graduation. Now, having recently received his bachelor’s degree in business analytics and poised to start a master’s program in the same field, he can’t imagine himself anywhere else. And it all started with a game of cards.

At 15, Caleb Dunlap thought he wanted to become a doctor, but admits his grades could have been better. His parents divorced and often, he says, there wasn’t a lot of extra money for the family of five kids living in northern Minnesota. “I’m Ojibwe from Nagaajiwanaang, the Fond du Lac Reservation 30 miles from Chi-gami [the name his people call Lake Superior],” he says.

As a 12th-grader at Menlo-Atherton High School in Northern California, Anna Quinlan is a little preoccupied. What senior isn’t? But here’s the thing: It’s all about science — heady stuff like helping people manage Type 1 and 2 diabetes through her very own invention, a low-cost, closed-loop insulin pump. She calls it an “artificial pancreas,” a breakthrough that won her the Grand Award in the 2018 National American Indian Virtual Science and Engineering Fair (NAIVSEF) sponsored by AISES.

Learning how to smoothly transition from learning in a classroom to navigating a workplace can be tricky. At her internship with Boston Scientific, University of Oklahoma student Alexis Keeling learned how to be a working engineer. Besides picking up a lot of company-specific procedures and tools, she was able to see how what she has learned in school applies to real-life manufacturing. Keeling, Cherokee, says that as an intern you are expected to do true project work that applies to your education, as well as learn how a company functions, outside a textbook.

Like many other Native students, Kenny Swift Bird was motivated to go to college. He had some great teachers at the high school in his small Nebraska hometown of Chadron, less than an hour’s drive from his Oglala Lakota Tribe’s Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. When he took statistics, calculus, and chemistry, his teachers helped him discover both his aptitude for STEM and how much he enjoys it.

At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., there’s something big happening. It’s called Mars 2020 — a mission to position NASA’s next Mars rover so it can investigate a region where the ancient environment may have been favorable to microbial life. Translation: the search for signs of life on the Red Planet is heating up.

Alex Allard has always been interested in biology — and in helping people. So it’s no surprise that these interests shaped his academic studies. His path has not been easy, but having recently graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a major in physiology and a minor in kinesiology, Allard is poised to make his mark.