Best Job I Ever Had Posted on January 20, 2009 An early experience with a preschool project influenced her decision to seek a research career, explains Hortensia Amaro (bio).

I became active actually before I knew Amado [Padilla] in a group, an undergraduate group of students who were doing tutoring in the schools with Latino kids in East L.A.

And one summer we said, "What are we going to do this summer?" and we came up with this project of developing a bilingual, bicultural preschool in the Pico-Union area. We had for about four years we taught 150 Latino preschoolers. We developed a bilingual, bicultural preschool for them

And I still say that it's the best job I ever had because it was very powerful to see these very small children come, very open to learning, very eager, and some of them were behind where they should have been, but really eager to learn and catching up.

And then later going to visit them in the 1st and 2nd grade and being devastated to see what had happened to them because of the school system. How they were being discouraged; how they were being stereotyped. I had teachers that I was working with in the classrooms — I was a volunteer as a student — and she would say to me, "These are your potential drop-outs and your delinquents."

And the way she treated them, yes, she was shaping them into that, and so I felt like I became interested in doing research because I realized that while one-to-one and having good clinicians is really critical, that we could have more impact.

I felt that research really was ammunition for making social change and for changing services and informing policy, and that's really why I became interested in research.