Underwater Dreams Inspire Latino Youth

Lorenzo Santillan, a student featured in the documentary Underwater Dreams, was a featured guest at NCLR’s Family STEM Day this month. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) was the setting for the daylong event and provided an opportunity to bring an awareness of the STEM field for parents and their children. More than 300 middle and high school students participated, along with their parents. Dr. Raul Reyna, Executive Director of UTSA’s Prefreshman Engineering Program, opened the event and introduced keynote speaker Santillan.

In his keynote speech, Santillan spoke about the barriers he and his fellow students had to overcome to be successful in school and beyond. He praised his family and teachers who helped him along the way to get to where he is now as an enterprenuer and a speaker.

After the keynote address the students participated in several STEM-related breakout sessions, presented by UTSA students and professors. Many of the presentations featured robotics programs from several local science academies. These hands-on sessions allowed the participants to interact with people directly involved in the STEM field.

After the students participated in two rotations of STEM activities they were treated to a special screening of Underwater Dreams. The screening was followed by a question and answer session with Santillan, which included questions about how he became interested in robotics and other challenges he faced during the competition, which is the subject of the documentary. Afterward, students had an opportunity to meet and speak with Santillan.

We thank Lorenzo Santillan, Dr. Reyna, and the entire UTSA Engineering Department for hosting this wonderful family event!

To learn more about NCLR’s youth STEM work, go to nclr.org/issues/education