Noble cause, Nobel guest

UC IRVINE — Estancia High School sophomore Karla Villegas, 15, hopes to attend college after she graduates high school and has already started preparing for a collegiate experience.

Villegas was one of about 200 Orange and Los Angeles county students who were treated to an hour-long lecture and question-and-answer session Saturday with Nobel Laureate and UC Irvine research professor F. Sherwood Rowland.

Rowland discussed his work in chemistry and on the topic of global warming.

The students have been participating in a five-week Saturday course called Global Issues Forum, which was created to educate high school students so they might become more informed global citizens.

“Our students in high school predominantly cover history in their classes,” program organizer Ellen Schlosser said Saturday. “But we’re living in the 21st century and its realities, and they can’t always understand those through the high school curriculum.”

Throughout the five weeks, Villegas and her peers were put into groups that subsequently created mock nonprofit organizations with a strategy to combat a global issue.

Students tackled heavy issues like global warming, water pollution, immigration, public education, healthcare, discrimination and poverty in the United States and abroad.

They created presentations with what they believe was the cause of the problem, as well as a plan of action, solutions, resources and how a community could get involved.

“Now I know how to help the community,” Villegas said. “Instead of being just a part of the problem, I want to be a solution.”

Villegas learned about nongovernmental agencies and the United Nations during her Projects of Change, but a documentary about child soldiers in Africa really opened her eyes to the things like her education that she said some students take for granted.

“Everyone is want-want-want — I want an iPod, or whatever the latest and greatest is,” she said. “But that’s not most important.”

The program was developed by the university’s Early Educational Partnership Program and the School of Social Sciences’ Global Connect, which Schlosser started.

The students overwhelmingly voted to have their closing discussion revolve around global warming and treated Rowland much like a celebrity, trailing him out of the auditorium to snap photos with the professor, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in atmospheric chemistry. Rowland found that chlorofluorocarbons were linked to ozone depletion.