You know STEM stands for Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
But you know and it's true you learn a
lot of the subject specific material but
while also STEM teaches you is critical
thinking skills, working in teams, meeting
deadlines, projects designing experiments and etc etc and I think all those skills
actually translate well in other courses.
This division is responsible for about
25% of all the full-time equivalent
students that are taught here on campus.
In our biology program we actually teach quite a variety of students.
I teach both Geology and Earth Science and that
course is typically for students that
are pre-service k-6 teacher.
We contribute to just about
every program in some way shape or form
either as providing a general education
course.
Allied Health students, Nursing, Respiratory Tech and etc which are taking our courses as
prerequisite in order to move on into
the nursing program and so on and of
course we serve Bio majors. That would
then allow students to transfer or prep
themselves well for becoming school
teachers and that could be not just the
sciences it could include Mathematics. And then also
those students who are anxious to get into professional programs.
In the higher-level math classes a lot of the students are planning to be Engineers,
I also have a lot of students who are pursuing careers in education that want to be Math teachers
that go on to pursue a degree in Math and a Math Credential.
Pre-med, pre-dentistry, ophthalmology,
Physical Therapy, Pharmacology they all go into these science courses that we provide.
There are 113 community colleges in the state of California there's only
about five that have a fully contained
and fully developed Engineering transfer
curriculum to any of the CSU or UC
campuses. I think we're going to become a
facility that the community is going to
be very proud of.
Time that we are in now universities the
cost tuition is going up and and the
number of students, its harder into some
of these schools and schools have this
huge enrollments and then we see a
lot more students taking the option to
be here at AVC take their two or three
years here and move on in it's a nice
low-cost option, the education you get is
a lot more personal.
Here again with that 48 person cap or 72 person cap on many classes, I know the names of every
single one of my students and it's
pretty easy to take the time to try to
get to know every student and helps them
reach their goals.
AVC is unique in that it provides a lot of opportunities and we have some great programs out there
like that Transfer Alliance program
what we call the TAPS. We have the
Learning Center which offers tutoring
for students at all levels. We have
faculty are engaged in undergraduate
research. And that's catching on more and
we've seen our classes really grow
because the people are starting to
utilize all these resources we have here.
A lot of the local Engineers around here
are working on cutting-edge technology,
brand new things one-off pieces really
really amazing stuff. In many cases our
students are exposed to laboratories
exposed to interactions with local
industry who eventually going to be
their employers. There's a big need for
Engineers up here we have Edwards and
all kinds of other Engineering firms and
Aerospace Engineering that are looking for people.
So we try to adapt our labs,
adapt our hands-on experiences to teach
the students how to use these cutting-edge equipment testing the implementation devices.
Once students get that sense of wonder it kind of lights a flame in them
it allows them to grow and
that flame can affect other people in
the STEM education can expand and say
hey this is exciting and that's why we
emphasize a lot of hands-on and inquiry
based learning in our majors courses and
that's our goal of this campus.
