Why we should look beyond grades to spot potential in STEM

From ScienceMag:

The girl in the lab coat was extracting DNA from a piece of lettuce. She held the pipette like it was something sacred—like it might break if she breathed too hard. Beside her, a boy adjusted his goggles, avoiding eye contact. He didn’t ask a single question. Not because he didn’t have any, but because somewhere along the way, someone taught him to stay quiet. Outside those walls, their parents were at work under the Arizona sun, harvesting the same crop. They pulled lettuce from the earth to feed the country. Their kids pulled out its genetic material to understand it. The overlap was intentional. In this 1-week summer camp, we aimed to show students that there is a path from the agricultural work their communities have done for generations to STEM.

The program was personal for me because I, too, grew up in an agricultural town, the son of immigrant farmworkers. Schools were underfunded, the guidance counselor overworked, and expectations modest. College wasn’t the assumed path—it was the exception. I know what it’s like to sit in classrooms that prepare you for labor, not leadership, and to feel the quiet sorting that tells some students they belong in universities and others they don’t.

I graduated high school with a 1.9 GPA, so community college was my only option—and even then, I struggled. My first year was marked by a string of withdrawals and failing grades, culminating in a 0.0 GPA. But slowly, class by class, I found my footing. A few instructors encouraged me to stay with it, and eventually I was able to transfer. A decade and a half later, I had earned a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate from Harvard University—outcomes the student I once was could never have imagined.

Today, I am a tenure-track faculty member at Arizona State University, a role that still feels improbable given my beginnings. Shortly after I started, state education officials approached my academic unit with an idea: to launch a STEM program for students from migratory farmworker families, a group that is underrepresented in science despite descending from generations of agricultural knowledge holders.

I know what programs like this can make possible. I am a product of federally supported training programs that intervened at critical stages in my own education. When I was an undergraduate student, for instance, a Department of Education program for students from disadvantaged backgrounds helped nudge me toward doctoral study when that path still felt distant. I have long believed that genius is evenly distributed across society, and that it just needs room to surface through exposure to science.

So I accepted the state’s challenge, and with colleagues developed a program that enrolled 50 to 80 high school students each year for four summers. Students lived in dorms, ate in dining halls, and rotated through immersive, hands-on labs led by faculty. Designed to replicate the university experience, the weeklong program aimed to make science tangible and accessible. Evaluation across cohorts showed consistent gains, including increased interest in STEM careers as well as meaningful rises in college aspirations. On paper, the program worked.

My favorite outcomes, however, were ones not captured by numbers. For many students, this was their first time away from home. They arrived shy and guarded, unsure how to introduce themselves or how to relate to the academic world. As the days progressed and they stepped into university labs and saw people who looked like them, they began confidently asking questions and talking openly about wanting to become doctors and researchers. By the end, they were reluctant to leave the community they had built in just 1 week.

The experience stayed with me because I was once the student with a 1.9 GPA, unsure of my place, waiting for someone to see potential that the data could not show. I could identify with the girl who once hesitated with the pipette and now steadies it with confidence. I see myself in the boy who had not asked a single question but now leans forward, curious and engaged.

I wish the system did a better job of looking beyond traditional academic metrics when assessing potential. Because watching these students, I am reminded how transformative that moment can be when someone finally sees in you what you could not yet see in yourself.

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