HARLINGEN – Valeria Bautista Misakova may not be Irish, but she’s about to become a Fighting Irish.
The aspiring astronaut is about to graduate from Harlingen High School South, and with diploma in hand she’ll head off to study astrophysics at Notre Dame.
“I feel beyond blessed and excited about my future,” said Valeria, 17. “After I graduate from Notre Dame, I plan on applying to grad school, probably somewhere like MIT or Oxford. My final goal is to be part of something big.”
While she’ll be in the astrophysics program, her particular interest is extragalactic studies.
“I’ve always been fascinated with the way our universe is, the way our Milky Way came to be,” she said. “Extragalactic studies through Notre Dame through their astrophysics program would really allow me to really focus on those systems that exist outside of our Milky Way.”
Valeria is one of the intended results of the Harlingen school district’s initiative to bring more females into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields and then into those professions. She’s known from a young age she had a love for physics – and that she’d be entering a male-dominated field.
She’s come from a family of engineers, so her relatives knew how to prepare her.
“It was just kind of like, ‘Oh, you’re going to go into science. You’re not going to fit in that well,’” she recalled.
But that didn’t stop her.
In her freshman year she took Intro to Engineering, proving her courage to confront challenges of new opportunities, but it certainly wasn’t easy. In a class of about 25 students, only two of them were female, one of them Valeria.
“It was a weird experience because usually you work better when there are people that are like you and have that experience with you,” she said. “I personally didn’t get along that well with most people until later on during the year.”
She especially remembers that too often her classmates didn’t want her in their group projects. As has often been the case in school PE classes, they weren’t always eager to include her in their “teams.”
“I overcame that by just trying to fit in in a way,” she said. “I tried to socialize with these classmates around me and try to relate to them, like, ‘Hey.’ And I really shouldn’t have to prove myself but, I had to because I didn’t want to be left out. So it was really just that proving myself, that I was worthy of being in this class and ‘working with you all.’”
And it worked.
“Now I’m really good friends with them even to this day,” she said.
She spoke with great passion of her love for physics.
“I’m a really huge nerd when it comes to physics, so Notre Dame just has the perfect program for that,” she said, explaining a particular interest in planetary bodies outside the Milky Way.
“There are a bunch of other galaxies like Andromeda that is next to us,” she said.
Parallel to all this, she’s also been active in speech, drama and debate, spending five years honing her communication skills and excelling in Congressional Debate.
Perhaps it is her skill and success in this art form, along with grades that place her number six in her graduating class, that convinced Notre Dame to welcome her into its presence – and give her a $300,000 scholarship.
Editor’s note: This is part of a series highlighting the accomplishments of female HCISD students pursuing STEM professions.
