My Life Story: Proyecto Access

In high school I never felt like I had a good group of solid friends.  My core group consisted of Sam, Sam and Amber, and the drama was nonstop.  We were, after all, teenage girls.  But to be able to count the number of friends you had on one hand when your school had over 3,000 people in it was rough.  However, every summer I was able to balance that out, when I found myself to be at the center of a great group of friends.  It was the only time that people would come up to me and know who I was when I had no idea who they were.  And it felt good.  Weird, but good.

Yes, every summer I felt popular when I spent eight weeks at a math, science and engineering based summer school for high school kids.  Does it get anymore ironic?

The truth is, I didn't even like those subjects.  But when my science teacher in eighth grade told me about the program and I realized that I had nothing better to do, I signed up and was admitted.  I started meeting the other kids, who weren't even in my assigned class group, when I had to be at the school and hour early because my mom had to go to work.  That was about the same time that Jason and Bia would be getting to school.  And then I would have to stay after school for an hour to wait for my mom to come back home and I would go to the library with Brian, who also had to stay and wait for his dad.

We all bonded over making fun of a girl named Yasmin, who had a unibrow.  We were mean, but she was annoying and sucked up to the teachers.  We wrote a song about her, where we called her a yeti.  I am 100% positive that this is the reason that I am terrified for people to notice that my eyebrows are unruly.  Besides Yasmin, there was also Veronica, a name that Brian gave to a really skinny man that could be seen running without his shirt on around Oxnard College's campus.  He was given a woman's name because of his long hair and slim body, which would have made us assume he was a woman had it not been for the fact that he was always shirtless.

We took classes in logic, basic engineering, physics, technical writing, algebraic structures, computer science, chemistry, etc.  I don't really remember a lot about any of it, except that our logic teacher was later fired from his junior high for molesting a girl, our technical writing teacher gave us third grade worksheets to fill out, and our computer science teacher who was a waterpolo coach at a rich private school looked like a child molester.  He was sweaty and large.  In addition, every day for the last hour we had R&R, which stood for "research and review" but really meant that you could find a group of students playing spoons, Korean jacks, or laughing hysterically instead of finishing their bridge project.  One time Brian and I got in trouble for having a water fight with the distilled water in our chemistry class during R&R.

We also went on field trips every Friday, including multiple trips to the California Science Center.  We took tours at UCSB (where we also went swimming in our clothes for the fun of it) and went to various museums in the area.  Mostly those days were good for spending time on the bus singing songs from the Lion King at the top of our lungs and annoying everyone around us.

We were a family.  The Spice Family.  We had a pen with a Barbie head on it that we called Spenis.  We built 3D space ship puzzles and memorized 50 digits of pi.

We were such geeks.  And we were also totally awesome.

Most of our group did a total of three summers at Proyecto.  We were the biggest Proyecto site in the country.  NASA funded us.  The point was to get more women and minorities interested in math and science.  Apparently it worked, as a good deal of our group has since graduated from college in a science related field.  Some are still working on degrees, mostly in science.  And one... is a model.  A male model.  I don't really know where that came from because he used to be way weird.  I have a picture where he taped paper triangles to his forehead to look like an anime character.  I also taught him about tampons, which he thought were the size of a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.  He was wrong.  After that lesson we left random tampons everywhere on campus, including in the drinking fountains.  Don't worry, they were unused.

Proyecto Access shut down after my last year.  NASA lost funding and cut the program.  It was too bad because we had the largest third year group that Proyecto had ever seen and they had been considering adding a fourth year to the program, and I always wanted to grow up to be a mentor.

This, maybe, was what got me on track to majoring in the sciences.  It definitely got me on track to feeling like I could make and keep a large group of close knit friends, which would come in quite handy when I started having summer jobs with a group of ten people.

Me (wearing a horrible outfit), Sam (who was not in Proyecto Access but came the last day regardless), Vinny (who I took under my wing), Adrie, Laura, Sandra, Jenny, Jason (who I called "Sexy Man" and had a jingle that corresponded with the title), Robia, Chad, Olivia, Adrie's friend and in front Crystal, Nikki, Jessica, Brian and Aimee.

One of my favorite moments was when Jessica fell and literally rolled like a bowling ball.