August Extraordinary Leader: The HPU Senior with the Curious Mind

Alan Vasquez Soto is a stargazer.

He’s gone twice to some of the tallest mountains in the world to peer through a telescope and track the stars that look like Christmas lights in the sky.

His work has paid off. Nearly two years ago, he discovered a white dwarf star, and in a rare move for any undergrad anywhere, he’s writing about it this fall for a scholarly journal. He will be the first author, not a contributor, a big deal for any college student.

He now has another big deal. The HPU physics senior, a Presidential Scholar from Greensboro, North Carolina, has been selected as an Extraordinary Leader for August.

Vasquez Soto is a first-generation college student.

In 2001, his family came from Chile to the United States to give Vasquez Soto a better education. He was just 5.

He couldn’t speak a word of English. Now, he will graduate in May and set his sights on going to grad school to become either an astrophysicist or nuclear physicist.

Vasquez Soto loves a challenge. Why? Look no further than a soccer ball.

The Importance of HPU’s Personal Touch

Vasquez Soto hated soccer practice.

He didn’t like running up and down the field because he was so out of shape, and he wanted to quit. His mom said no.

“You started the season,” she told him. “You need to finish the season.”

He did. He ended up playing soccer for a decade.

Be committed. See things through. That’s what he learned from his mom.

His parents divorced when he was 13 and his sister was 7. His mother raised two children on what she earned as a waitress. Meanwhile, her son discovered physics in high school and found his passion in thinking in abstract ways about how and why things work.

Vasquez Soto loved it. He loves HPU, too.

Vasquez Soto is a University Ambassador, a coveted campus job where he gives tours to prospective students and their families. He’s one of 10 University Ambassador captains, and when he takes groups on tour, he will often swing by the science department in Couch Hall.

But always, he ends his tours at the Wanek Center balcony that overlooks David Hayworth Park.

Ask Vasquez Soto why he came to HPU, and he mentions more than the beauty of the campus. He mentions the beauty of HPU’s physics department. He discovered a nurturing environment created by a nurturing faculty that made themselves accessible to every student.

That personal touch sold him. But what really captured his intellectual curiosity was working with Dr. Brad Barlow, HPU’s assistant professor of astrophysics.

For Vasquez Soto, that made all the difference in the world.

The Benefit of Saying ‘Yes’

Three years ago, Dr. Barlow stood in the first organizational meeting for the first HPUniverse Day and tossed out a question to all the students around him.

“Hey, is anyone willing to help me build a hovercraft?”

Vasquez Soto raised his hand. Back then, he was a freshman, and he and Barlow built a hovercraft out of a shower curtain, duct tape and a sheet of plywood.

That’s how their working relationship began.

Vasquez Soto began helping Barlow with his research. But Vasquez Soto had no astronomy experience. So, the spring semester of his freshman year, he sharpened his astronomy knowledge by spending 90 minutes with Barlow every week.

Barlow, in his own words, “grilled” Vasquez Soto. Even today, Vasquez Soto calls those sessions “brutal.”

But those sessions turned him into an astute researcher. He has participated twice in HPU’s new Summer Undergraduate Research Program, better known as SuRPS, and last summer, he scored an internship with Greenway Solutions, a high-tech consultation company in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Yet, Vasquez Soto reaped the biggest reward when he accompanied Barlow and a few other HPU students to the place he had never visited since he was 5, let alone remembered.

He went back to Chile.

A Star Discovered, A Life Made

During his sophomore year, Vasquez Soto went to Chile twice – once in October and seven months later in May.

On those trips, Vasquez Soto stayed at first in La Serena, a city in northern Chile. He took a two-hour bus trip to the top of a mountain more than a mile high. There, Vasquez Soto stayed in a dorm, walked 10 minutes and spent hours at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.

He downloaded data, worked on computer programs, opened the dome, carried out research and did something big.

In October 2015, Vasquez Soto and Eugene Filick, an HPU physics student, discovered a white dwarf star.

“It’s hard to put into words,” Vasquez Soto says today. “But it was really cool. Seeing that white dwarf star for the first time was like seeing a newborn. It makes you feel full.”

Barlow knows that feeling. Ever since he was a kid, peering through a telescope in his back yard in Mississippi, he has always been in awe at what he saw above him.

He’s also in awe of Vasquez Soto.

“Alan is someone unafraid to dive into discomfort,” Barlow says. “It’s always pure curiosity.”

The dwarf star discovered by Filick and Vasquez Soto has a name – or a series of letters and numbers. It’s SDSS J234158.11-094717.0.

The name may be hard to remember. But not the moment.

It was 2 in the morning, halfway through a week of work. Filick and Vasquez Soto were analyzing the stars at the observatory using a computer program Vasquez Soto had written. That’s how they discovered the star.

When they did, they stared at the computer screen, hardly saying a word for five minutes. Then, Barlow walked in.

“Looks like we discovered something,” Vasquez Soto told him.

“Tell me about it,” Barlow responded.

They did. In that moment, Vasquez Soto made his own discovery.

“Be patient, work hard,” he says today, “and you’ll reap what you sow.”