Cashman students receive mentoring, then scholarships

Without hesitation, 11-year-old Thomas Tran will tell you he wants to go to college, get a doctorate and be a pediatrician.

But college is a long way off for the sixth-grader at Cashman Middle.

That’s where a new, long-term initiative by the California-based company Informatica and the local Public Education Foundation hopes to assist.

Tran is one of 25 rising sixth- and seventh-graders at Cashman selected to participate in the “Next 25” initiative, meaning he will receive a $2,500 college scholarship and mentoring until he graduates from high school.

Informatica, a software company specializing in data management, hosts annual conferences in Las Vegas and serves customers here as well. The initiative is a celebration of 25 years in business, borne out of a desire to help students and a community.

“Genius camps” hosted twice a year will allow the 25 students to build confidence and social skills, with a curriculum that highlights the importance and relevance of data, said Sally Jenkins, Informatica’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

The Public Education Foundation, meanwhile, will assist with monthly check-ins on the students and their families, she said.

It’s a great match for students at Cashman, which features a magnet program focused on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.

“It feels amazing, because it just helps us advance in life,” 11-year-old Sophia Nation, another Next 25 recipient, said of the initiative. “It also shows that we’re doing the right thing.”

The initiative will build upon a love of STEM fields that already exists in these young students. At school, students completed projects that delved into real-world problem-solving.

For seventh-graders, that meant using a computer design program to help design a prosthetic.

Nation said she wants to be an engineer.

“STEM plays a really big role in whatever I really want to do,” she said. “Because I’m pretty much into figuring out how things work and how to put it to use.”

Roughly 50 percent of the students in the group will be the first in their families to attend college, and some are also English-language learners, according to Informatica.

Alejandro Arias, a seventh-grader, said the initiative is just one of many ways the students can track their progress.

“It gives us a big insight on what else we can do and what we’re good at and what we’re not by providing us with information and letting us work with other people of our same level of intellect,” he said.

Contact Amelia Pak-Harvey at apak-harvey@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4630. Follow @AmeliaPakHarvey on Twitter.