At Berkeley High School, internship opportunities are rare. There are almost no programs that directly connect students with summer internships. However, BHS’s Biotechnology (Biotech) program is a notable exception. Biotech is a two-year-long career technical education (CTE) class that, in the summer between the junior and senior years, provides students with many internship opportunities. Judging by the success of the Biotech program, BHS must implement more internship-providing classes as they help students learn about fields they are interested in, get real-world job experience, and learn life skills.
Biotech focuses on laboratory skills in the context of chemistry, biology, and data analysis. “In Biotech 1/2 students are introduced to all the basic laboratory equipment and techniques that would make them successful in an internship in the summer between junior and senior year. In Biotech 3/4, we build on those experiences to introduce more advanced lab techniques, more independent lab work, and advanced biological engineering,” Nick Pleskac, a Biotech teacher, said.
While Biotech internships are highly beneficial to BHS students, they only represent a very narrow segment of the STEM field. Biotech is specifically designed to help underprivileged students enter into the STEM field, so by providing students with more internship opportunities like those given by the Biotech program, a more diverse group of BHS students would be interested in more STEM subfields in the future.
“Kids who sometimes shy away from STEM might be a lot more interested to do it (STEM) if they had that two year pathway because in Biotech you get a lot of support,” Ori Boozaglo, a BHS senior in her second year in the Biotech program, said. According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanic Americans hold 17 percent of all jobs in the United States, but only nine percent of the STEM jobs. While women hold only 14 percent of all engineering jobs, white men hold 49 percent of all STEM jobs. This inequality is unfair to people in those groups and helps to perpetuate wealth inequality and our patriarchal society, and the creation of more Biotech-like programs can help stop this.
Some students believe that the Biotech program is widely-encompassing enough to not merit creating additional programs. “Biotech is not just biotechnology … each of the internships vary widely,” Boozaglo said, explaining that there are internships through the Biotech program in areas a myriad of areas, like medicine, environmental science, and even forensic science. “Biotechnology is doing an amazing job of providing a wider array of these opportunities in STEM fields,” she added.
Even though Biotech covers many topics within STEM, there are still many areas it does not cover, like mechanical engineering and computer programming. More internship opportunities and new two-year CTE programs could help improve diversity in the STEM field. BHS must improve access to internship opportunities for underprivileged BHS students to ensure STEM does not remain a field dominated by a specific demographic.