They are pioneers in participating in this program, so their example will serve as a guide for all students interested in participating in the so-called STEMBach, Baccalaureate of Excellence in Sciences and Technology, an initiative promoted by the Xunta de Galicia and to which the University of Vigo joined from the beginning. The A Sangriña high schools in A Guarda and Plurilingüe A Paralaia high schools in Moaña were two of the first centers to join this experience and, two years later, their students are also among the first to publicly defend their work, research projects on which they have been working for the last two years.
Although the forecast was that these projects would be defended before the month of May, the situation caused by the health emergency meant that these dates had to be postponed and only these two centers chose to defend their projects in the month of May virtually through the classrooms of the UVigo Remote Campus. A few days ago, the students of IES A Sangriña did so, tutored from the Faculty of Marine Sciences by research staff from the Marine Research Center, and this Monday the project defenses continued, in this case in the Faculty of Biology, with the students of IES Plurilingüe A Paralaia. The rest of the centers decided to move the presentations to the month of July in the hope of being able to do it in person.
Two volunteer work courses
Seven students from IES A Sangriña and nine from A Paralaia participated in the presentations. Divided into groups, these young people have been working hard over the last two years on these scientific projects, completely voluntarily as an extracurricular activity carried out outside of their school hours, with the support of teachers from their institute and university professors. But the effort was not in vain, during these presentations they had the opportunity to demonstrate to a jury that they know how to prepare and defend a research project.
Divided into three groups, the students of the IES Plurilingüe A Paralaia defended their works before a jury composed of the director of the institute, Álvaro Rodríguez; the coordinator of the STEMBach program at the center, Carlos Velasco, and the professor of the Faculty of Biology, Diana Valverde. Tutored by the professor of the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Immunology, Emilio Rolán, the first group to present presented a work on the polymorphism of the color of the shell in an intertidal sea snail; the second, tutored by professor Paloma Morán, delved into the genetic identification of animals following the strategy of the Barcod+ing of life project, a methodology that allows the identification by genetic methods of any species.
The third group was supervised by the professor of the Department of Functional Biology and Health Sciences, Manuel Megías, and consisted of deepening the knowledge of neurons through antibodies. This work was aimed at identifying, observing and characterizing populations of neurons in the cerebral cortex, for which they used rat brain sections, both in paraffin and in flotation.
Approaching scientific laboratories “with great curiosity”
“I think that for the students the most important thing was not the knowledge acquired, but the process through which they were able to acquire it,” explains Professor Diana Valverde, who emphasizes the fact that through this program these students had the opportunity to approach scientific laboratories “with great curiosity and respect,” and “they saw complex techniques and procedures in a very direct way, thus awakening vocations.”
“They didn’t know what they were going to do, what they were going to find… Now, two years later, they already know, on a small scale, how the university works and how research is carried out there, an important issue if we take into account that they are science baccalaureate students”, explains Professor Carlos Velasco, to which he adds that today these students know what it is like to prepare a research project and defend it and that puts them at an advantage over the rest of their classmates when it comes to carrying out their Final Degree Projects. “In addition, the fact of facing new and unknown goals from what they were doing until now, and very well, will help us in the future to face the challenges that life presents them with previous experience”.
From the university teaching staff’s point of view, Valverde explains that this experience involved a great effort, as everyone had to adjust schedules and activities, “but it was something that was done with great enthusiasm and, seeing how much interest the proposed topics aroused among the students, the effort was compensated.”
16 UVigo centers participate in the STEMBach program
From the beginning, the majority (16) of the UVigo centers expressed interest in participating in the STEMBach program, although today there are ten schools and faculties that have active projects with secondary schools, both in the provinces of Pontevedra and Ourense and in A Coruña. “In addition, there are two other centers that are currently working with different institutes to join the program immediately,” explains the vice-rector for Student Recruitment, Natalia Caparrini, who explains that the centers with active programs are the schools of Computer Engineering, Aeronautics and Space, Industrial Engineering and Mining and Energy Engineering, along with the faculties of History, Philology and Translation, Biology, Economic and Business Sciences, Marine Sciences and Chemistry.
These centers currently collaborate with ten institutes: eight in the province of Pontevedra, one in Ourense and one in A Coruña. “For us as a University, this experience has been very positive from the very beginning, firstly because of the response from the teaching staff and the centers of UVigo, who quickly joined this initiative of the Xunta de Galicia and who are working side by side with the IES in a totally selfless way, but also because of the objective of the project, to encourage a vocation for research and scientific and technological studies, something that is a priority within the framework of the STEAM activities that this vice-rectorate is promoting”, emphasized Caparrini.
The participation of the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo was co-financed through its co-financing under the FEDER/FSE Galicia 2014-2020 Operational Program.
Source: DUVI
