BERKELEY Inspire

While enrolled at a community college in Rocklin, California, Wesley had his sights set on nursing. Medical school, he said, felt like an “impossible” dream reserved for people with more money or more time. “I didn’t think med school seemed realistic,” he recalled. “I thought nursing was more manageable.”

But while working as a caregiver in a senior-living facility, Wesley bonded with a resident, who asked him what he wanted to do in life. When he expressed his hesitations, she challenged him to choose what he really wanted to do, a challenge he has accepted with purpose and perseverance.

Since transferring to UC Berkeley, Wesley has traded the quiet intimacy of caregiving for the intensity of upper-division STEM courses. Majoring in microbial biology, he has found his footing in several ways. He moved into a student cooperative, which introduced him to an immediate circle of friends. He regularly attends office hours to ask his professors about whatever is on his mind, whether it’s his assignments or aspirations. And he is steadily amassing real-world experiences to shorten the distance between his interest in human health and his possible future as a researcher. For example, he recently helped coordinate clinical research on acute kidney injury at UC San Francisco.

Redefining the threshold of what he once considered “really good work,” he said, “Berkeley has forced me to go above and beyond where I already was.”

When asked what object best represents his Berkeley journey, Wesley pointed to a poster. Accepted into the George A. Miller Scholars Program, which provides 10 transfer students a year with scholarships, project support, and mentoring, Wesley utilized his funds to conduct research. He dedicated a year to studying how CRISPR-Cas9 — the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing technology developed, in part, at Berkeley — could be used to treat bacterial diseases in the gut that are resistant to traditional antibiotics. Throughout the project, he worked closely with a postdoc to learn about the research process, write a paper, and create an accompanying poster.

Dense with complex text and graphs, the poster is more than a program requirement destined for storage. It’s a marker on the path that signals where Wesley turned from a student who consumes knowledge into a researcher who creates it. While he is still considering his next steps, he now knows that no dream is “impossible.”

Berkeley Discovery redefines opportunities for undergraduates

While the Miller Scholars program introduced Wesley Fernandes to the foundations of research, Berkeley Discovery gave him a seat at the professional table.

At a time when innovation is required to prepare students for a rapidly changing, complex world, Berkeley Discovery sets a new standard in experiential learning. It offers several ways to ensure that every undergraduate — regardless of their background or circumstances — can pursue projects that bridge the gap between their intellectual curiosity and applying what they learn to real-world challenges. Its primary components include Discovery Hubs, in which undergraduates work side-by-side with graduate students on interdisciplinary research, and a centralized platform listing thousands of internships, scholarships, public service projects, and other hands-on experiences.

Through Berkeley Discovery, Wesley became a clinical research coordinator for a pharmaceutical study at UC San Francisco on patients who develop acute kidney injury (AKI) as a result of sepsis. Pushing far beyond the menial tasks that an undergraduate might typically perform, Wesley’s role included identifying study participants within an urgent timeframe; collecting patient data; ensuring the study adhered to regulations and guidelines; and communicating with patients, families, and other team members.

“You don’t realize how much impact these studies mean to the actual patients themselves,” he said. “These drugs can be life-saving.”

Among other opportunities Wesley has taken advantage of, working at UCSF challenged his notion of who gets to be a doctor or a researcher. “When I first came to Berkeley, I felt like a lot of people around me were much smarter,” he said. “At the same time, I think you should also go back and recognize, ‘This is the work I’ve done. I am capable of this. I can do this.’”