Many students think they need to go directly from high school to the Ivies to have a career in STEM, but a program run by the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) shows City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) students that’s not the case.
The Introduction to Molecular Engineering course is a yearly program that brings CCC students to the UChicago campus for three weeks of lectures, demonstrations, lab tours and career development seminars. This summer saw the sixth cohort, showing 17 students the possibilities of a life in science and engineering.
“One of the things that we tried to do is make sure that the students understand that the research here is accessible to people who have not gone to Ivy League schools, people who are not going directly from undergrad into graduate school,” said UChicago PME Senior Associate Dean for Education and Strategy Rovana Popoff.
Many of the students had interrupted college careers or started as older students studying alongside classmates fresh from high school.
A cancer diagnosis at age 25 ended Celeste Baca's career in the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants.
“I got sick. Got very sick. I had thyroid cancer, which is a very good cancer to have, but what it meant was that my days cooking in a kitchen were numbered,” she said. “I don't recover. I don't recover from working on my feet for 12 hours to 14 hours.”
Now 28 and cancer-free, she is studying physics at Malcolm X College, hoping to pursue high-energy particle physics in graduate school.
Cancer also played a role in Adrian Nava’s career path, although not his own.
“I want to specialize in cell and tissue engineering with the goal of helping design and create artificial organs,” he said. “I have a lot of family that had cancer, including my grandmother who passed away last year.”
Popoff said the course is part of UChicago PME’s commitment to giving back to the Chicago community, but that the school, university and STEM in general get more in return.
“If we don't explore all the possibilities and mine all of the talent that's out there, if we're just looking in particular spaces, we are missing out on opportunities to advance knowledge,” Popoff said.
Here are the stories of two students who thought their paths would never take them to science.
Kitchen to lab
Baca admits that physics is an unexpected turn after a career in fine dining.
“If you have to go to do something, you might as well do physics, because it's so fundamental. And also, if you're going to do it, you should do it,” she said. “If I'm going to go to school, I'm going to do the whole thing. I'm never going to regret having an education.”
Her path started in rural Oklahoma.
“I grew up in a trailer, very, very poor,” she said. “I love school. I was always very good at school. But when I was done with high school, there was a whole world out there.”
In 2019, when she was 21, Baca moved to Chicago – the nation’s most affordable city with Michelin-starred restaurants. She built a career in some of the city’s finest kitchens, but cancer changed everything.
The restaurant moved her from the kitchen to less physically taxing work at the front of house when she started to show symptoms. Coworkers and restaurant regulars set up a Go Fund Me after her diagnosis. Her restaurant provided health insurance, but she knew how rare that would be over a career in the restaurant industry.
One month after her thyroidectomy, she enrolled at Malcolm X in 2023, ready for her second act.
Paths and legacies
Nava’s path to college also veered. The South Side Chicago native went to the University of Wisconsin after high school to study biomedical engineering, but soon dropped out.
“COVID-19 was a really hard time for a lot of people,” he said. “I just realized that I couldn't do online school.”
After a few years of working at Whole Foods, he started to think about his family’s history of cancer, and about the lack of healthcare resources family in Mexico had compared to the treatment family in the U.S. received. He enrolled in Richard J. Daley College to get back on the path to cancer care.
“I want to do anything I can to help them and honor their legacy,” he said.
Nava, 23, and Baca, 28, both transferred to the University of Illinois-Chicago. Baca started this semester; Nava will start in 2026. Both of them will be older than most of their undergraduate classmates.
To keep nontraditional students from being discouraged, Popoff deliberately picks Introduction to Molecular Engineering instructors from a variety of educational backgrounds, a mix of UChicago postdocs and grad students who attended Harvard, MIT and small community colleges.
“The course ended Friday, I worked on Saturday,” Nava said. “That whole morning, I kept thinking, ‘Maybe I can do a PhD in something. Maybe research is a way of going to graduate school.’ I owe a lot of it to the instructors, living the lives that they do and coming from the places they come from. It left me thinking maybe I can do this as well.”