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2001 Valedictorian Working with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contractor While Pursuing PhD
Pedro Rojas, City Tech’s 2001 Valedictorian, still remembers 1993 like it was yesterday. That’s when he arrived in the United States from his native Ecuador hungry for educational opportunity and the chance to forge a better life for himself and his loved ones back home. But as he crossed the border between Mexico and the U.S., all he could think about was learning the English language as quickly as possible and getting a decent job in America to repay his parents, who had taken a loan on their small farmhouse to raise the money to finance his journey.
Standing in the spotlight on the stage of the Theater at Madison Square Garden in spring 2001, Rojas movingly recounted the details of those past eight years to a spellbound audience of more than 6,000 other City Tech graduates, their families and friends, professors and administrators, and other guests.
“There will always be borders to cross and challenges to face,” he said. “I crossed a physical border to come here, but I also crossed the borders of language, of culture, of education, of what it took an immigrant who did not speak the English language to make it in America, to get ahead. It was a question of making a commitment and setting goals that were reachable.”
A young man of exceptional intelligence, Rojas had seen no meaningful future for himself in his native land. Once here and settled in New York City, he quickly found a job as a busboy and mastered the English language within a year of his arrival. Higher education was soon to follow.
The year 2001 brought him his first college degree -- an associate in telecommunications technology with a 4.0 grade point average -- and selection as City Tech’s valedictorian. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in the same field from the College in 2004 and completed his master’s in electrical engineering with a concentration in photonics at The City College of New York/CUNY in spring 2006.
For the past two years, Rojas was a National Science Foundation-funded “Bridge to the Doctorate” student through the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, which awarded him a $30,000 a year fellowship. He also worked as a graduate research assistant with City College’s Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers, assisting Professor R. R. Alfano and others on the development of novel laser materials. Selected results from the experiments he conducted were published in 2005 under his name and those of his research colleagues in a journal of The American Physical Society.
The next step in Rojas’ plan is to continue studies towards a PhD degree, but that effort is being delayed briefly as he relocates to accept a permanent position with Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI), a firm under contract to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside the nation’s capital. In June 2006, Rojas started to work at SSAI as an staff instrument engineer on the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), a key instrument aboard NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua and Terra satellites that provide the scientific community with remote sensing observations for long-term global studies of land, oceans and the atmosphere.
His work involves the design and development of active or passive remote sensing instrument systems, instrument electronics, ground support equipment or systems for test and calibration of space-flight sensors. He is also involved in developing state-of-the-art systems to verify and validate pre- and post-flight instrument calibration and performance as well as in designing, developing, testing and implementing software algorithms for instrument operations, data analysis and operational performance assessment. After settling in at Goddard this summer, he will begin his doctoral studies, with the added benefit that NASA and SSAI will permit him to draw on his work at Goddard as the basis for his thesis.
Rojas worked at Goddard previously, as a 2005 summer intern/research associate with the center’s Observational Cosmology Lab. “The permanent position with SSAI/Goddard provides another opportunity for me to further my professional experience through involvement with a NASA state-of-the-art project,” he explains.
It has been a long journey since Rojas arrived in the U.S. 13 years ago. “A lot of people helped me along the way,” he says today, “from my parents who trusted me and my employers who gave me flexible work schedules so I could go to college to my professors at City Tech and City College who always went the extra mile to help me excel in my studies.
“I’ve been lucky, but I also believed in myself,” he adds. “When I first came here, speaking no English was very frustrating. Instead of allowing that frustration to defeat me, I used it to push myself to achieve my goals. I told myself over and over again that if others could do it, I could do it, too.”
Not only did Pedro Rojas, who is now a naturalized U.S. citizen, repay his parents in full from his salary over the years working as a busboy, a waiter and a bartender, he also squeezed enough from his earnings to help finance his college education, help all seven of his siblings back in Ecuador complete their high school education, help put one sister through college and help finance a successful deli that two other sisters operate there. It goes without saying that his family is very proud of him and of what he has accomplished, “although what I am doing in my research and related work,” he says, “is very difficult for them to understand.”
08/28/06
