Young Latino Scholar Stays Grounded

Roberto Zamora says he felt pretty good about his math and physics background once he arrived in Boston to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“I expected MIT students to be much more advanced than I was because many of them went to private high schools and had taken courses I had never even heard of,” Zamora says. “I soon learned that the strong foundation I had developed in high school enabled me to hold my own against any problems the professors would throw at me.”

But then there were those other science courses.

“I do have to admit that I felt unprepared for some classes such as biology and chemistry,” he says.

After catching up, Zamora graduated from MIT in 2007. At age 23, he is now a graduate student in the physics department at the University of Chicago.

He is an unassuming young man who attributes his academic success to simply doing his studies and staying out of trouble. But to appreciate his plight, you must consider that Zamora graduated from Porter High School (’03) of the Brownsville Independent School District (BISD) in Texas. About 98 percent of the district’s 48,400 students are Hispanic, mostly of Mexican descent.

The dropout rate for Latinos is currently just under 50 percent. And only about 11 percent of Latinos have a bachelor’s degree or more. Beyond that, according to a 2006 Census Bureau report, Brownsville is the poorest city of its size in the U.S.

For teachers in this town along the U.S.-Mexico border, this means that 95 percent of their students are categorized as “economically disadvantaged.”

I imagine that it is students like Zamora who inspire teachers to do their best work. And it is teachers like those at Porter who inspire students like Zamora to excel.

“I think Porter did an excellent job of preparing me with real-world skill sets that cannot always be found buried in textbooks,” he says.

For example, Zamora was a part of the Technology Student Association (TSA) where he and two friends competed in an event known as Systems Control Technology. In this competition, teams were given an industrial type problem and asked to come up with robotic solutions in a three-hour time span.

“In this event I learned how to work under pressure, communicate on a team, give a presentation, and use my creative skills to come up with solutions. I can honestly say that I used each and every one of these skills quite often in college, especially in my aerospace engineering courses,” Zamora says. “These abilities are usually what determined the difference between an A and B, or whether my team's engine prototype was picked as the winning design.”

Socially, it was challenging for Zamora to adjust to being so far from home.

“The northeast has such different weather and culture there is no way you can move there from Brownsville and not feel some sort of initial shock,” he says.

Going from high school to college will bring all sorts of shocks. Fortunately, students like Roberto Zamora will persevere and make their teachers proud.