Fall/Winter 2011-2012
When Jared Dozal began taking classes at Ventura College he didn’t know what engineering was.
Then he found MESA.
Three years later Dozal is a senior environmental engineering major at UC Berkeley and project manager of a cleanwater project in Peru with the UC Berkeley Engineers Without Borders chapter.
He spent 10 days in Peru this summer with a team of students building filter systems to remove naturally occurring arsenic from a village water supply. His group hopes to return in January.
Dozal said the transition from community college to Berkeley was fostered through MESA.
While at Ventura, Dozal said MESA helped him with study skills, academic planning and application processes to successfully transfer. He also received a MESA-administered National Science Foundation Scholarship in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
“I was grateful to be involved with MESA because it made everything go smoothly when I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said.
The 34-year-old enrolled at Ventura College after his housing construction work dried up following the economic downturn. Dozal said he always liked math but didn’t know how to apply it.
Dozal—the first in his family to go to college—said he is thankful to the MESA staff at Ventura College.
“Whenever I needed help Marcos (Lupian, MESA director) was there,” Dozal said. “He pointed me in the right direction.”
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