Bay Area Youth Science (BAYS) Program

The program is called the Bay Area Youth Science program or BAYS, and the objective of this program is to welcome people that can likely see UCSF from their house that have never had the opportunity to walk in these halls.

The primary reason that BE-STEM, which is black excellence in STEM, exists at UCSF is to build a community amongst the few black students that are here within the basic science programs.

And we want to kind of extend that sense of community to the underserved students, interns, potential scientists that we’re bringing to UCSF through BAYS.

And one of the reasons we’re building on this community is to connect this base students to other similarly underrepresented students that are being brought in through other existing internships at UCSF, such as cure and SRTP.

So that they can gain knowledge from other students that have gone through similar experiences, potentially at the next level that they’re preparing to take.

So they can build off of that knowledge and be prepared for the next steps in their scientific careers.

The biggest thing with BE-STEM in the connection with BAYS is really just trying to share the community that we built here at UCSF with people who are traditionally excluded from science.

I think that it’s incredibly important to have these students at UCSF and see not only see people that look like them and these positions and let them know that they can have a future here to give them that opportunity at a starting at the high school level, I think is absolutely important.

When I got to UCSF BE-STEM provided me, the community and the group and the peers to help me see like there’s a lot of ability that I have, and that I'm a superhero in my own right.

And so I think BAYS, being a BE-STEM product is allowing us to tell younger black students that and brown students, that they too are superheroes in their own right.

And the moment that we tell them that the sooner that we tell them that we can build them, we can nurture them, we can mentor them into creating the next best scientists that anybody has ever seen from a community that they didn't even expect them to come from.

The BAYS program is an excellent opportunity for students from the Bayview Hunters Point area to get exposed to cutting edge science that they normally would not be exposed to.

There are excellent facilities, equipment and resources here that even if the students are exposed to science, it will not be this level of science.

That coupled with the mentors experience, shadowing with the students helping them through this process.

It’s a phenomenal opportunity.

What we’re looking to do with BAYS is we’re looking to bring those students to UCSF, for a lot of reasons.

One, we want to fix the nonexistent pipeline for historically excluded people to get here.

And we think that because the pipeline has languished for so long, we need to make our intervention early in high school.

And the way that we've kind of built the program is we take rising seniors into the program, they use the summer experience to obtain a high impact letter of recommendation.

And then we also have a college prep bootcamp session, where we help them leverage their experience here to be more competitive, and to open more doors for them when they’re applying to undergrad.

One thing that we really wanted to focus on this summer is making sure that once the students get here, they’re really in an environment where they can thrive.

And paramount to that for us was developing a relationship between the mentor and the students in which the students feel included.

Students feel supported and the students feel confident in their ability to make mistakes and learn and grow.

And so for us, we wanted to create this mentor orientation program to teach our mentors how to be those educators for their students.

When I think about my future and careers in scientists, it’s all about mentorship building the next group of great scientists and so this program has been sort of the first time that I've had an opportunity to do that.

And it’s been a great experience so far to just see that click of like, Oh, I get this and this is so cool.

It’s it’s just awesome. I just really wanted to be in something like this. Science is a career I actually want to get into and a program like this It provides opportunities that are not normally accessible.

This program is very unique and it is very good opportunity for undergraduates for high school students who need that experience in order to transition into college.

It’s really rewarding working with these students, I got a text from one of them the other day that they got into UC Berkeley and to UCLA.

One of our other students got into 32, actually no 42 HBCUs.

They really do get a lot out of the program and they enjoy working with their mentors and being at UCSF, and it’s great for us to work with them too, and get to see their growth throughout the program.

And we’re just really committed to the opportunity to bring people that had been excluded for no valid reason into this institution, bring that intellectual diversity in and bring that diversity of experience in and overall just increase our ability at the institutional level to do cutting edge super high impact science.

And we think that ultimately, what we’d like to see is for BAYS to continue growing and become a longitudinal investment in these individuals.

So we’d like to see the scholars come back while they’re in undergrad and continue building relationships with high impact professors here, and then eventually, we’d like to see them participate in the Summer Research Training Program, and maybe even matriculate here for graduate studies.

I fit here because I have the brains to be here.

I have everything that I need to be here.

I'm just as well to be here as anybody else.