RCC internships bring new STEM opportunities to students

For Sasha Nario, her educational experience wasn’t always the best.

She pursued, for years, a business degree that didn’t excite her. She struggled to connect with it and to stay engaged.

Then she switched to studying physics and her love of education came back with a passion. Part of that has been the opportunity to get hands-on experience in a lab through an internship program at Roxbury Community College.

“My past experiences with school weren’t the best. I still got my opportunity, and I would never trade it for anything. It was a very impactful internship,” said Nario, 21, a Dorchester resident working on an associate degree in physical science from RCC.

Nario, who completed an internship at Northeastern University’s Center for Theoretical Biophysics, is one of 50 RCC students who participate each year in internships through the school targeted at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — or STEM — fields.

It’s a program that Hillel Sims, associate vice president of academic affairs, said is important to expose students to real-life roles in the field, as well as provide mentorship and networking connections.

Throughout his almost 10 years at the school — he has previously served in roles including dean of STEM and associate vice president of workforce development — he has been pushing for more students to complete an internship, he said.

Roxbury Community College, shown at sunset, Nov. 14. PHOTO: AVERY BLEICHFELD/BAY STATE BANNER

“We always talk about the fact that you can get two identical students; they’re both at graduation, and one of them has completed things like an internship and other related opportunities in the field, and that is what distinguishes them,” Sims said. “Their degree opens the door, but it’s everything else about them, including the internship, that walks them through a door — whether that’s into another job, another internship, or their next degree.”

The opportunity for students to get their hands on work in the field can help them decide if it’s a good fit, he said.

“If nothing else, it allows them a chance to experience what it’s like to work there, to see whether or not it’s something that is really going to appeal to them while they’re still early on in their careers,” Sims said.

For Nario, her internship experience did just that, bolstering her renewed love for education as she dove into her physics education.

“I was very unfamiliar with what this career path would look like,” she said. “It gave me the experience to kind of have a sneak peek into what it’s like.”

At RCC, the program can bring students into two types of roles. With a wide swath of biotech companies in and around Boston, students can pursue an internship at a life sciences company in the area. Or, because RCC doesn’t have its own research labs, the school has developed partnerships with local four-year institutions to place students in a research environment.

Sims said the program has helped connect students with employment opportunities following graduation, or to seats in four-year degree programs at the schools where their labs are hosted.

“They form these real connections,” he said. “They don’t even want to stop working at those internship sites, and some of them don’t, and this actually helps them then to continue on.”

RCC’s work in connecting students with internships comes as organizations across Boston’s communities of color look to connect a more diverse collection of workers to STEM employment opportunities.

“These communities of color have not only the need but the desire to do these kinds of programs and to enter these fields,” Sims said.

For him, RCC’s internships work to make connections and fill gaps for students who might otherwise lack access.

“It can be hard for the student on their own make that connection themselves,” Sims said. “Either they don’t know the people, or they don’t know who to talk to, or they’ve never gotten involved in that.”

Separately, RCC has been involved in ongoing work with the Nubian Ascends development to build opportunities in the area. That development is set to include the Nubian Square Life Science Training Center, a 40,000 square-foot lab space in a broader development that will also include arts and culture amenities.

That training center, which received $50 million through last year’s economic development bond bill, will incorporate education support from RCC as well as other nearby institutions, including Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and Mass BioEd.

Already, RCC has worked with the NuSquare Life Science Training Center, pairing its long-running summer STEM program for high schoolers with the center’s support.

And the community college has partnered on developing local connections to STEM jobs more broadly through the work of the Roxbury Worx initiative, a program run by The American City Coalition to bring middle-skill workers — those with an associate degree or some college but don’t hold a bachelor’s — into life science, green tech and health care jobs.

“It’s all connected. It’s pathways, it’s a network of connecting all these different STEM activities to try to support the students,” Sims said.

For Nario, the experience opened her eyes to what she’s capable of. It was one reason she said she would encourage other students to apply, even if they don’t know that they’ll get in — a position she found herself in when she was considering the application to the Northeastern University internship.

“I think for many students, sometimes being doubtful of your own capabilities, that’s what kind of brings us down,” Nario said.