Outreach
I have been involved with outreach programs ever since I was a high school student in the MESA Schools Program. The focus of this section is to highlight my past and current involvement in pre-college outreach. The programs below could always use assistance. If you are interested in helping feel free to contact me at michael@mjvillareal.net.
Also programs such as the ones below are suffering budget cuts left and right. Without the support I have recieved from MESA as a high school student I would not have developed leadership skills or been prepared for college. Please contact your local congressman and urge for the continued support of SJSU MESA, Math Science Upward Bound, and outreach programs in general. You can find your local representative by entering your zip code in the form or by visiting www.house.gov.
Being a product of the MESA program and the fact that it has opened many doors for me,
I feel a sense of obligation to the program. The objective of MESA is to get students who do not
typically go to college to not just strive for higher education but to encourage the math, science, and engineering fields.
Below are some of the roles I have been able to play for MESA at San José State.
- Washington Square MESA Advisor: For students who do not have MESA at their school they can come to SJSU once a month to get their fill of MESA. I've been doing this for the past few years and have helped increase the student participation by 300%. To me, the point of the Washington Square chapter is to get middle and high-school students onto a college campus and hopefully encourage them to strive for higher learning while developing their team and leadership skills.
- MESA Advisor Training Institute (MATI) Presenter: MATI has been held at Cisco Systems the past two years and I've been able to be a presenter there. The objective of MATI is to overview MESA Day competitions and introduce hands-on activities to MESA Advisors. At this year's MATI I trained teachers in the web design competitions which focus on HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Last year I presented brown bag (1 hour hands-on) activities.
- MESA Day Lead: MESA Day is the highlight event of the year for MESA. It is a day where all MESA students, around 600+ middle and high school students, come to San José State to participate in math, science, and engineering competitions. I've been the lead for a variety of activities for the past few MESA days at SJSU and even a MESA Day at University of the Pacific. Some of these activities were: Ice Cream Physics, Water Bottle Rockets, Team Building Activities, Air Powered Vehicles. The pic to the right is from me in the school newspaper, The Spartan Daily, for last year's MESA Day. Here we are shooting off water bottle rockets. (I am the one crouched down launching a rocket)
- Web Maintainer: Since I work so closely with MESA at SJSU and they know that I am somewhat a techie, they asked that I help with the redevelopment of their website. My job is to manage the content on the site. There is a lot of content needed to be put onto the site but if you are interested in its progress or in MESA in general please visit www.sjsumesa.org.
Math Science Upward Bound
The objective of MSUB is basically the same as MESA's. The main difference is that MSUB has a summer component where students live at a college for 6 weeks. I have been able to be a part of this the past 5 summers with the Monterey Peninsula College MSUB which is hosted at beautiful UC Santa Cruz.
Truly, working for this program is intense. From the moment I am awake to the moment I go to sleep I was working. But this program is truly rewarding. The MPC MSUB program has 50+ high school students from all over California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Hawaii, Guam, Pohnpei, Marshall Islands, Chuuk, Rhota, and Saipan. For 3 summers I was the Computer Tech/Resident Assistant. My role then was to maintain the computer lab and all program computers and to make sure the dorms and the students were under control. I was also able to teach math classes once a week.
Summer of 2005, I was promoted to Program Coordinator/Residential Supervisor. This basically meant I was the lead on site. This was probably my most challenging job but also the most rewarding. I was able to gain good management skills by overseeing the teachers, resident assistants, and students in the program. I was also able to gain good project management skills by handling [and delegating =)] a variety of projects concurrently. One of the ways I wanted to make my mark in my position was by creating a web presence for the program, which you can see by going to www.mpcmsub.org.
Also, to document the summer program I have taken the video footage and made a summer yearbook DVD for the 2003 and 2005 summer programs. If you were a participant during those summers and did not receive a copy of the DVD please email me at michael@mjvillareal.net. The video above is a short promotional video I made for the program.
San José Science Workshop
The San José Science Workshop was my first job out of high school. This was my introduction to working with youth and although I learned kids can be a handful I heightened my skill in patience. I have worked for San José Sciece Workshop at National Hispanic University and at San José High where the Workshop served as a community center for local students to drop into the Workshop and do a variety of hands-on science activities. Many of these activities came from the Exploratorium and can be found here.
For the academic years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 I worked with the Workshop at Horace Mann Elementary School.
This was different from my previous experience with the Workshop in that it was no longer drop-in, but rather
an after school science program, and also it was with elementary kids and not high school aged students.
There is a HUGE difference. These kids never failed to surprise me or to tire me out, but I loved every bit of it.
The highlight of working here had to be being an advisor for a group of five for Tech Challenge 2005. The Tech Challenge 2005 was Battle the Blaze and the objective was to design a device that would take a water balloon, move it from the base of an obstacle course, up a ramp, and down a hole to put out a simulated fire. This was not easy, especially when working with 3rd and 4th graders. But the kids surprised me with their ingenuity and their presentation skills as on the day of the event they won third place for Best Overall Device Demonstration. Mind you there were 50 other teams and the category they were competing in was 5th and 6th grade while they were 3rd and 4th graders. Proud I am =).