Aaron Velasco describes himself as the only US-born Latino seismologist in the country. As a faculty member at the University of Texas, El Paso, he is part of a rare group of under-represented minorities who make it into tenure-track academic positions in the United States. His story illustrates part of the reason for the abysmally low numbers of others like him. "I honestly could not afford to become a postdoctoral fellow," says Velasco, recalling how the enormous debt he had built up during almost ten years of studying beyond high school forced him to seek something better than a postdoc's salary.
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