Chasing Down a Dream

For one first generation Texas Tech student, an early encounter with a thunderstorm sparked a lifelong goal.

Written by Cory Chandler

One dark night, the wind snarled, dust rubbed the stars out and a 4th grade girl got her first glimpse of Mother Nature’s fangs.

“I thought the world was going to end,” says Theresa Aguilar, now a junior geophysics major at Texas Tech, of her first meeting with a truly jarring thunderstorm. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

A Storm Chaser is Born

Yet what would send most 10-year-olds scrambling for the soft security of their blankets left Aguilar glued to her family’s television set and sparked what has become a lifelong curiosity. As the gales raged against her Anton house, Aguilar sat monitoring the progress of the storms outside.

She hasn’t stopped analyzing them since.

“It got me curious,” says Aguilar. So curious, in fact, that she wanted to learn more. After that first eye-popping encounter, Aguilar was determined to become a meteorologist.

She spent the rest of her grade school days plotting a course that would break her into their field. She pored through library books. She did class projects covering all flavors of severe weather. She bent the ears of Lubbock meteorologists.

“Everyone in my classes knew what I wanted to do,” she says. “If you told them what I’m doing today, they’d say ‘no big surprise.’”

Upward Bound

Determined as she was, however, Aguilar did hit a stumbling block: Her high school in Anton was too small to provide the same offerings enjoyed by students at larger schools, she says. Also, she was the first person in her family to pursue college. While she knew she wanted to attend, she says she lacked direction and resources to get there.

Then she encountered two things: The Upward Bound Program and an article in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal profiling a student intern in Texas Tech’s Department of Atmospheric Science.

Aguilar joined the Upward Bound program her sophomore year in high school. She credits that program, along with her parents, for giving her the support she needed to get through high school.

And while Upward Bound provided her the resources she needed to get to Texas Tech, she says, the newspaper article gave her a direction once she got here.

Inspired

“The story was mainly about the student and her job as an intern, which was to analyze hurricane data and storm chase,” Aguilar wrote recently. “I was so excited because that was exactly what I wanted to do.”

It also gave her a name to work with: Dr. John Schroeder, an assistant professor of atmospheric science. Schroeder offered her a position as a student assistant, where Aguilar cut her teeth studying hurricane data.

Sky's the Limit

As an intern in Texas Tech’s Wind Science and Engineering Research Center, Aguilar began honing her forecasting and storm chasing skills.

So far, she’s crossed paths with potential tornados and tangled with hurricanes. She helped deploy the wind engineering center’s renowned instrumentation towers to collect data from hurricanes Dennis and Emily. She’s dashed down rutted dirt roads in hopes of nabbing a tornado – an experience she describes as “a little terrifying.”

Aguilar is confident her experiences already have laid the groundwork for postgraduate success and to her goal of earning a Ph.D. and researching severe weather.

Aguilar has been accepted to the prestigious McNair Scholars Program, which awards grants for projects designed to prepare students for doctoral studies and is currently considering research topics with Schroeder.

She also has been accepted into Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science– a bridge program intended to encourage undergraduate students to pursue graduate degrees in atmospheric science.

“I will already have a genuine idea of what to expect for my upcoming courses and the materials they will cover,” she says.