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Many minorities come to the university wanting to major in biology but are overwhelmed by introductory courses in science and mathematics. According to Andrew Martinez, professor of life sciences at UTSA, "It's during the first two years of the major that we lose many of the talented and promising minority students. So we spend a lot of our effort on retaining freshmen and sophomores." To keep lower-division students from leaving biology, UTSA has sought to do many different things well. For example, new laboratory courses for beginning biology students emphasize real-world applications, such as using electrophoresis to solve forensics problems or working with enzymes to study digestion. "The experiment is designed to be about something they can relate to," says Martinez. "Even a simple thing such as enzyme digestion has an important principle behind it." UTSA also has sought to involve students in research projects as early as possible. Each year biology faculty members recruit a small group of freshmen and sophomores to work in faculty laboratories. A special focus of the biology department has been Hispanic women. In many Hispanic families, Martinez notes, women traditionally have been expected to stay at home, although cultural expectations are slowly changing. UTSA has been recruiting women in high schools and community colleges, getting them into research laboratories, and encouraging them to do summer research. Cynthia De Leon, now a Ph.D. student in the neurosciences program at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, was one of the Hispanic women recruited into a laboratory as a sophomore at UTSA. Born and raised in a small town in South Texas, she had never been as far from home as San Antonio. But her experience in the lab allowed her "to interact with students on a research track who were really motivated," she recalls. A subsequent summer research project at the University of California at San Diego further sparked her interest in the neurosciences. "If it wasn't for those programs, I wouldn't be where I am today," she says. "They enabled me to go a lot farther than I ever would have been able to on my own."
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ocated on the far northwest side of San Antonio, the University of Texas
at San Antonio has an enrollment of about 15,000 undergraduates and 2,400
graduate students. More than half of San Antonio's population is Hispanic;
another 7 percent is African American. At UTSA, Hispanics make up 36 percent
of the student population, and nearly all are from the local area.
Hispanic students at 
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