Project SEED scholar Rita Baskett

Abstract

Rita Baskett says she felt like an outsider when she was first placed in a lab through the American Chemical Society Project SEED program. Many of the other students in the labs were family members of researchers, she says. “But I came a different route.” Baskett’s father immigrated to the US from the British Virgin Islands with a fifth-grade education. Her mother, a high school graduate, was a crossing guard in Baskett’s hometown of East Orange, New Jersey. One of Baskett’s sisters joined the military, while the other was the first in her family to graduate from college. “I was the second!” Baskett says. Baskett says she always had an interest in the sciences and was a part of her high school’s math and science club. Her chemistry teacher told her about Project SEED, which provides summer research experiences to high school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. That summer, Baskett