Editor’s Note: This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Growing up in San Antonio, Reina Saldivar had always loved science—all she wanted to watch on TV was “Animal Planet.” Yet until she applied on a whim to a program for aspiring researchers after her first year at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she assumed she would spend her life as a lab technician, running cultures.
The program, Maximizing Access to Research Careers, or MARC, was started by the National Institutes of Health decades ago at colleges around the country to prepare students, especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds, for livelihoods in the biomedical sciences.
