On Saturday, UCSB will honor José Hernández as its 2015 Distinguished Alumnus and also start up its Dreamer Scholarship fundraising for the coming year, a program that supports college attendance for students without legal residence documentation. Being the first in the family to go to college is a huge point of pride for high schoolers, and keeping them there is a concern for university educators. With UCSB's nomination in January as a Hispanic Serving Institution — based on enrollment of more than 25 percent of students who are Latino — the school received a $2.6 million grant to develop a new program over five years that will work with professors, tutors, and students to ensure more freshmen make it to their sophomore year.
Though Hernández was born in California, he worked the fields with his parents and siblings nine months out of the year as a child, and he didn't learn to speak English until he was 12. He makes a return appearance Saturday to UCSB — he gave the commencement speech in 2014 for the School of Engineering — from which he graduated with a master's in electrical and computer engineering in 1986. His advanced degree was part of his desire to become an astronaut, a dream he'd had since watching the last moonwalk in 1972.
Hernández often attributes his success to perseverance, noting that NASA rejected him 11 times before accepting him into the astronaut program. He made it into space in 2009 aboard Discovery on a 14-day mission to the International Space Station. But he's most proud of the lives he's helped save through mammography technology to detect breast cancer that he helped develop while at Lawrence Livermore. He'll receive UCSB's 2015 Distinguished Alumnus award, in part, for his work with kids in the Stockton area, preparing and encouraging them toward science, technology, engineering, and math careers. The lunchtime ceremony takes place October 24, 12:30 p.m., in Corwin Pavilion.