High school senior and multi-sport athlete Azalea Manco has spent the last few months researching the impact of wearing a weighted vest during cardio workouts after an Army recruiter encouraged her to train while carrying a heavy backpack.
“I started researching weighted vests and they have been used for the military [and] for people in general, who want to practice strength training,” Manco said. “And I thought, ‘What better way than to go to the gym and put on a weighted vest and run?’”
That research was presented this past weekend at the annual Riverside County Science and Engineering Fair, Manco’s last. In May, she will graduate from Desert Hot Springs High School and join the U.S. military with plans to become a construction engineer.
Manco was just one of more than 500 Riverside County students who showcased their science fair projects at the Riverside Convention Center over the weekend. The students in grades four through 12 competed in 22 separate categories, from behavioral and social sciences to translational medicinal science, for a chance to showcase their work at the statewide and international science fairs.
For some of these students, like Manco, the fair also provided a window into potential career paths and fields of study as they prepared for life after high school.
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Temecula Valley Unified junior Hayley Foo’s project was inspired by a recent personal experience that motivated her to begin researching how to target a protein associated with an aggressive brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme using programmable DNA tweezers to see if that protein could be used as a diagnostic biomarker.
Foo, who wants to either attend a University of California system school or Johns Hopkins University, said the work she did for her project laid the foundation for what she wants to study in the future.
“I am really interested in anything at the molecular level,” she said. “I hope to go on the pre-med track in undergrad and hopefully become a practicing pediatric surgeon.”
For Martin Luther King Jr. High School students Erica Yin and Zoe Zhang the work they did on their project researching ways to optimize systems that remove a toxin that disrupts iodine intake during water treatment also influenced what they planned to study in college.
Yin said that she had always wanted to study civil engineering, but after working closely with University of California, Riverside, students as part of the project, she now said she wanted to find a way to connect her passion with environmental engineering.
“I got a better understanding of some of the concepts I was learning in class,” Yin said about her experience in the lab. “It really influenced what I learned, how I learned, all that.”
Similarly, Zhang said that she wanted to continue working on projects involving the environment, but was still debating whether that path was going to be through physics or chemistry. Overall, she said, participating in the county’s science fair helped her and other students home in on their interests.
“I think it allows all these students to come together and see what others have been doing, and allows us to learn more about other projects,” Zhang said. “Maybe you can become interested in that thing too.”
A total of 82 students took home gold medals this weekend, according to a Riverside County Office of Education press release, with dozens of those entries moving on to the state’s science fair.
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