Joe Banks

Student

“The whole experience at SMC was a way to regroup, refocus, reinvigorate and reinvent myself.”

Joe Banks looked up from a book one day and it was September. Whatever became of the summer? “I was a teaching assistant at USC’s dental school where I taught anatomy ten hours a week. Then I’d be at Cal State Dominguez doing my summer internship, 20 hours a week,” says Joe. “Then I was tutoring Denise Cavener’s anatomy students, and I had a class of my own to take. So usually,” sighs Joe, “I was up at 5:30, gone by 6, and back home—maybe—by 11 pm.” But in spite of his work load, Joe says that SMC has been a revelation for him. And his “wake-up call” came in the person of Denise Cavener.

“My whole life was changed by studying sciences with Denise,” says Joe. “I started tutoring for her and then was her teaching assistant for a year and a half. And that’s what involved me in teaching. Eventually, I’d like to teach, somewhere along the line, be it in medical school, in a health program, or at SMC,” he adds. “Basically, I’m a caregiver.” And Joe, through his love of science, got to care for a lot of inner city kids through the SMC Summer Internship in a Martin Luther King Hospital program. “We’d bring adolescents into our ‘magnet’ program, and for two hours I’d lecture them in science. This enabled me to connect with the future of our community—kids—from a segment of society which historically has been given no opportunity to participate in science. It was,” Joe says, “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

Joe sees problems with clear solutions in our country today. “It’s very simple: we need engineers in this country, but we hire them from elsewhere. We have people who are gifted but who are getting squashed by the time they’re 13,” he says. “Those are your engineers. Those are your scientists and doctors. But they are not taught and the results are a disaster for all of us. Because, after all, the primary resources of any country are its people.”

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