Continuing a winning record dating back to the mid-1990s, Massachusetts Bay Community College (MassBay) recently announced that student Lynn Desmarais was named a 2010 recipient of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship—the 17th student from the college to win the prestigious national award given to students pursuing math and science careers.
The number of Goldwater Scholarships won by MassBay students currently exceeds even that of highly regarded four-year institutions in the area, including Boston College with 14 such scholarships, Boston University with 10, and Tufts University with six.
“This is the only school in the country with such a record and it really stands out. The most that any smaller school has won is two or three scholarships.”
Patrick Quinn, a MassBay Goldwater scholar in 2008, said that he would not have been a successful student had it not been for the caliber of the college’s biotechnology program.
“Ninety-nine percent of the schools where you go to learn these things have to be four-year universities,” Quinn said.
But MassBay has the right stuff.
“They have a lab that is state of the art, and the head of the program—Dr. Bruce Jackson—is a renowned forensic DNA scientist,” Quinn said.
“You don’t usually get that kind of knowledge and expertise in a community college setting,” said Quinn, who now works on genetic testing at the University of Massachusetts.
Glenn Rowe, who won a Goldwater Scholarship in 1998 as a MassBay student and is now a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, also majored in biotechnology at the community college and went on to get a master’s degree in the same subject at Brandeis University.
“The whole idea of doing a Ph.D. in biomedical research—that foundation was given to me by MassBay. Prior to my going there, I did not know what research was or what a Ph.D. was,” he said.
MassBay President Carole Berotte Joseph attributes her college’s success in the Goldwater competition to one factor: faculty.
“They are the ones who have built the program into what it is today. They hold our students to a high standard and challenge them continually,” she said.
Institutionally, the college has focused its biotech program on preparing future researchers and professors, making it practically a mini-doctoral program, Joseph added.
“This is the sort of thing that a school has to commit resources to,” she said. “That is not an easy thing for any community college, but obviously we are proving that it’s very much worth our while to do so.”
An intense experience
Jackson, coordinator of biotechnology programs at MassBay, said he modeled the program on what his alma mater Boston University was doing in the area.
“We essentially shrunk down a four-year program to fit a two-year associate degree format,” he said.
The biotech programs at the college include a regular biotech program, a marine biotech program and a forensic DNA science. The DNA program in particular is research intensive, with students using DNA collection and analysis in actual criminal and anthropological cases.
“They learn all of the things that other students learn from a book, but in a lab setting,” Jackson said. “That means understanding cells and DNA at a sophisticated level so that they come away with an understanding of biology and chemistry and mathematics that is much deeper than their undergraduate counterparts.”
The program is intense, and some students drop out because of its demands, Jackson noted. But the students who do make it through the rigors have proven their skills and knowledge by racking up awards such as the Goldwater Scholarships.
Each year, the Goldwater program receives up to 1,100 nominees from U.S. colleges and universities, selecting around 300 college sophomores and juniors. The scholarships, which cover educational costs up to $7,500, are awarded on merit and financial need, with the program’s board of trustees also weighing such factors as nominees’ field of study, career objectives and the potential for making a significant contribution to that field.
For those reasons, MassBay’s large number of Goldwater scholars is even more impressive, especially since half of the scholars from the college were dropouts who returned to college, and a third were single mothers, Joseph noted.