My name is Evan Haze Nuñez and I am an incoming Astrophysics PhD student at Caltech. I majored in Physics as an undergraduate and attended El Camino College for my lower division classes, and Cal Poly Pomona for my upper division classes.
I got interested in astronomy through my mother. She wanted to be an astronomer when she went to college but due to financial circumstances she was unable to finish her degree. Even though she did not complete her degree she kept promoting science to me my taking me to the California Science Center, the Griffith Observatory, and to the library. When I was seven, my mother took me to the El Segundo Library where she allowed me to check out one book from the kids section. I immediately ran to the astronomy section and picked up a book on Mars and one on Venus. I had to make the hardest decision of my life up to that point; choose Mars or Venus. After reading their introduction Venus was the clear winner because it was a world that was so similar to Earth in terms of its mass, size, distance from the sun, and having cloud cover that we thought there would be life thriving on the surface. It turns out that Venus is hell. Lead would melt on the surface of Venus and it rains acid. This took my breath away and I found the diversity among objects in the Solar System incredibly and began to think about all of the diversity that exists outside of the universe.
I was exposed to the Cal-Bridge program while at El Camino College where all of its resources were explained to me at the CAMPARE symposium. I was so impressed by the program and the resources it offered that I ended up applying to a school that I had not even thought of attending; Cal Poly Pomona (CPP). I was offered admission to UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz but none of them had programs that were similar to Cal-Bridge. I am glad I made this decision because my network drastically expanded, I had fantastic mentors from both CPP and UCLA, and with the financial support that I received from Cal-Bridge I was able to rent a room with some of my peers from CPP allowing me to save at minimum 2 hours of commute time per day which gave me extra time to focus on my classes.
One nice unseen perk of the Cal-Bridge program is all of the sight seeing one gets to do while attending the Saturday workshops. The workshops themselves are very useful on their own but being able to experience a new campus, meet the students, staff and faculty from that campus, and sight seeing on the journey up to and from the campus was always my favorite part of the Saturday workshops. For reference, during my two years in the program we had workshops at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara.
I am “mixed” specifically half Black/African American and half Mexican, use he/him/his pronouns, and am a mommas boy through and through. I am an avid music listener who actively tries to discover more and more music as I go along because music is one of the things that keeps me sane during long study and research sessions (for those curious my top genres are rap, hip-hop, jazz, and indie alternative). I try to live my life as inclusively as I can by 1) straying away from the stereotypical “physicist attitude” which is plagued with feelings of superiority and importance compared to every other discipline 2) being cognizant and respectful of the identities, realities and experiences of others and 3) maintaining an open heart and mind for everyone that I meet. I would also like to give a heads up to underrepresented minorities in STEM, especially us in the Black community, to know that you are going to have to jump through unfair hoops and hurdles that were placed there by systems and people that did not want us occupying these academic spaces. Know that you can persist through them and that there is work being done to remove these hoops permanently, but it will take time. Reach out to me and other Cal-Bridge mentors if you need anything <3.
