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Speaker: OTAN-- Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

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Francisco Solano: I was born and raised in Mexico near Mexico City. And I'm the oldest of four of my siblings. I'm the only one who graduated from high school in Mexico. So at the age of 20, I moved to the United States and I ended up here in Salinas. At the Salinas Adult School, I took all the classes.

Andrew Henderson: When I first met him, he was taking English classes. And he would come to our Sunday dinners and he would kind of practice with my wife and I.

Francisco Solano: I remember the very first class where I was learning just the numbers and the colors. And then I progressed to intermediate and the high levels. And I enjoyed every single class.

Andrew Henderson: I think that Salinas Adult School was the beginning of an amazing journey for Francisco.

Francisco Solano: Taking the GED classes that I found my passion for learning, my passion for science. When I was taking the GED classes, the professor who was teaching it, Tim Amaral, was really passionate about science and STEM field subjects.

Tim Amaral: The placard on the wall in my room is you don't need an education to be a value, you need an education because you are a value. And I think Francisco really started to recognize his value in a way that may not have been known to him before. He started to find all kinds of parts of himself. And then just took off.

Francisco Solano: I asked all the questions, and he pushed me towards enrolling into college.

DR. JEFFREY HUGHEY: It's what he learned earning his GED and learning the language that he was able to use to succeed at Hartnell College, because science, as most people know, you're learning a good 50 to 60 new words each day for each chapter.

Francisco Solano: When I began learning about science, I realized that it's just another language. So I realized, well, if I already learned English, perhaps I could learn science to talk and think about as a scientists.

DR. JEFFREY HUGHEY: Francisco spent five years at Hartnell College earning three degrees, associate of science degrees-- one in biology, one in mathematics, and another in physics.

Tim Amaral: If you go to Hartnell and you need support with your work, come on back to class and I'll help you through it. So Francisco came back a lot.

DR. JEFFREY HUGHEY: And this was an internship looking at the genetics of a kelp fly. And so he analyzed the genome of a kelp fly and assembled that genome, analyzed it, and wrote a scientific paper up on that project. And he published that paper in a peer-reviewed international scientific journal.

Andrew Henderson: He was going to be published from a study that was being done at UC Santa Cruz. It was because he had actually done real work. He had contributed.

Francisco Solano: I'm beginning to find that small network that I need, that small support that every student needs.

Yvonne Petersen: We think Francisco has been part of the Salinas Adult School as we consider the Salinas Adult School family for many years. And as he always tells me and he tells all the other students to look at yourself like you are, and look at yourself how you want to be and you will be, because the Salinas Adult School will help you to accomplish those kinds of dreams.

Tim Amaral: And he comes back to my class a lot to advocate and mentor other students. Yeah, to represent for them somebody who's found a way through over, around, and up.

Francisco Solano: I see Francisco in five years graduating with a PhD degree in molecular biology, hopefully with a better understanding on how to help to treat cancer.

Tim Amaral: To go from where you are when you walk into a GED class, to being able to do research on cancer in a doctoral program, that says an awful lot about human potential and it's nice for me to see his face as the poster boy for that. That's a very good thing. It's really bright, it's really open, and I'm really excited for it.

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