Finding their spark

Ivan Segovia is a biomedical assistant at Cedars-Sinai Biomanufacturing Center. He’ll complete his associate degree in biotechnology from Los Angeles Mission College in December. (Photo: LAMC)

Student recruitment is an aspect of many of the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) initiatives that the National Science Foundation (NSF) supports with grants to community and two-year technical colleges.

ATE educators are aware that career decisions often happen in those momentary sparks of recognition when the day-to-day tasks of a job line up with what individuals like doing or with a life goal.

This excerpt comes from the current issue of AACC’s Community College Journal. The annual ATE Principal Investigators’ Conference started last week with virtual sessions and the in-person event in Washington, D.C., begins Wednesday.

For Brandon Dixon it was the “edginess” of cybersecurity that Casey O’Brien described during a presentation at Sollers Point Technical High School that caught his attention in 2004. Dixon was then a high school sophomore; O’Brien was an instructor at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC). Since then, O’Brien has continued to teach cybersecurity and serve as a leader of the National CyberWatch Center, an NSF-funded ATE Center at Prince George’s Community College (Maryland).

“Finding vulnerabilities and being able to exploit those to make security better — that’s kind of what drew me into security more broadly,” said Dixon, referring to the dual enrollment courses he took from O’Brien and other instructors at Essex College, now the CCBC’s Essex Campus. Dixon’s talent for making cybersecurity tools — his best known is PDF XRAY — led to his involvement in several start-up companies. Dixon became a product and intelligence strategy leader at Microsoft when it acquired the company that had purchased one of those startups.

‘Something more meaningful’

“Give me one full semester and I will change your life,” were the words that stopped Ivan Segovia as he passed a career fair while crossing the Los Angeles Mission College (California) campus in early 2020. The pitch is one Chander Arora continues to use. As a biotechnology faculty member, she worked with industry to design the biotechnology lab assistant certificate program that covers biotech basics and reinforces them with small group authentic research projects in one semester.

Segovia is a native of Mexico who took English-as-a-second-language classes at a community college on his way to becoming a U.S. citizen. The day he met Arora he was in his third semester as a psychology major, attending classes full time and working full time as a sales representative for a snack company. The job paid well, but Segovia “wanted something more meaningful.” However, the realization that it would be years before he was a licensed psychologist was weighing on him.

In fall 2020, he took the biotechnology technician certificate program, but because Covid limited his hands-on lab time, he waited to enter the workforce until he completed the biotechnology lab assistant certificate in May 2021. One week after finishing it, he started work at a dietary supplement company.

In December, Arora told him about an opening at Cedars-Sinai Biomanufacturing Center. She is currently the principal investigator of the Expanding the Biotechnology Pipeline to Adults Seeking Reemployment ATE project. Cedars-Sinai hired Segovia as a biomedical assistant in January.

“I enjoy my time over here. It never even feels like I’m going to work. It feels like I achieved what I wanted: I’m doing something with purpose — something meaningful,” he said.

Read the full article in CC Journal.

About the Author

Madeline Patton
Madeline Patton is an education writer based in Ohio.
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