Maria Ramos Gonzalez, a UNLV graduate who earned her PhD in mechanical engineering, poses for a photo at the Thomas & Mack Center Monday, Dec. 19, 2022.
Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Higher education takes time, and people along the way can doubt you. Stick it out.
That’s the message Maria Ramos Gonzalez has for her fellow graduates this week at UNLV.
“It’s hard. A Ph.D., going through academia, surviving this pandemic on top of that, it’s just hard,” said Ramos Gonzalez, who earned a doctorate degree in mechanical engineering. “And so you have to be the one to push forward.”
Ramos Gonzalez is among the roughly 2,300 people, from bachelor’s to doctoral students, aged 19 to 75, to be awarded a degree over the two-day winter commencement, which continues today at the Thomas & Mack Center. She’s already well on her way to a career in bionics — or neural prosthetics; think robotic hands — as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ramos Gonzalez, 31, has worked steadily toward her professional goals since coming to UNLV as an undergraduate in 2009. She graduated from Advanced Technologies Academy, a magnet high school in the Clark County School District, with an interest in legal studies that she initially wanted to parlay into law school.
But she was also interested in prosthetics already, and chose an engineering major knowing that any bachelor’s degree could be attractive to law school.
She no longer plans to earn a law degree, but does plan to take a bar exam next year in patents so she can be a patent agent — relevant knowledge for an inventor.
As one of the first UNLV mechanical engineering undergraduates to do the direct Ph.D. path there, she will be celebrating the culmination of 13 years of study, which includes some idle time when research labs were shut down during COVID-19’s early months.
Ultimately, Ramos Gonzalez defended her dissertation — finding a less-invasive total knee replacement solution — over the summer and is now at MIT working with experts in dexterous manipulation, perception and sensing to develop prosthetic robotic hands.
Few Hispanic women are in the academic and professional space she is now in, and when things got hard, her stubbornness and desire to represent the few women in the field helped keep her on task, she said.
“I want to say even just a couple years ago, there were only eight Hispanic females that were awarded a Ph.D. in engineering,” she said. “And I don’t remember if it was engineering, or specifically mechanical engineering, but regardless, eight is not that great of a number.”
Older scientists in particular have been skeptical of her abilities, she said; some suggested that she’s a diversity pick — that she was where she was because she’s a minority, immigrant woman.
As a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, meaning she was brought to the United States when she was very young, Ramos Gonzalez is an undocumented immigrant. She was brought to the United States before her first birthday from Colima, on Mexico’s west coast, by her mother, and grew up in a family with mixed immigration statuses.
Her mother and older sister, and some other family members, were further along in the residency and citizenship process at the time; her younger siblings were born in the U.S. Now that she has her Ph.D., she has more access to funding, but she is still not able to secure large, critical grants from organizations like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
But she sticks it out.
“I come from an immigrant family, and we were quite poor growing up. But my mom always encouraged me to pursue my education. And my mom and my older sister really are the reason why I was able to focus in school.”
People around her, not just her internal drive, also helped her graduate. Her mom, Ana, has just an elementary school education but worked nights as a janitor to raise her five children in Las Vegas. Her sister Veronica, elder by 11 years, also helped raise her. She also was uplifted by her partner, Cristina, and role models and mentors at UNLV.
Ramos Gonzalez said she never had a female engineering professor in her program, but she did have a guide in Jaci Bautista, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. She also credits Kyle Kaalberg, executive director of strategy and strategic initiatives in the president’s office; engineering librarian Sue Wainscott; former vice president for research and economic development Mary Croughan, who is now provost and an executive vice chancellor at the University of California-Davis; and retired mechanical engineering department administrative assistant Joan Conway, who caught her dissertation defense, for getting her through.
Not all graduates will have every one of Ramos Gonzalez’s characteristics. But there is plenty to identify with, in both directions: according to UNLV, the vast majority of this winter’s graduates are from Nevada. The average graduate is a little older — 25 for a bachelor’s degree, 32 for a graduate or professional degree. And about 70% are a racial or ethnic minority.
U.S. News & World Report recognizes UNLV as one of the most diverse campuses in the nation; Ramos Gonzalez said she never felt out of place as an undergraduate. And though she said more advanced levels of academia have a way to go, they are getting there.
She’d like to start an engineering practice in Southern Nevada some day, while also being an advocate for elite institutions like MIT.
“Now that I’m at MIT, I’d love to be the bridge to MIT. I want our students to realize that this is an option for them. Don’t let others say, ‘What are you doing here?’ Or, ‘You don’t belong here.’ You know, I was told that MIT would never look at me. And look at me now,” she said. “You don’t get to the top without having people show you their true colors along the way. But again, don’t let that discourage you. The higher you go, the more opposition you’re going to have. If it was easy to get here, like, everybody would get here.”
