One Generous Couple's Support Created a Surprising Career Opportunity
by Mark C. Anderson
Barbara Baldock and Phil Butler are two of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center’s (UROC) most loyal scholarship supporters. This is a tale about more than a strong scholarship tradition, self-determination, though that’s certainly a big part of it. This is a story that’s also about opportunity and where to put your energy to make it matter most.
When Baldock and Butler were in their 50s, a turning point arrived for them in the form of two books they read together, “How Much is Enough?” and “Your Money or Your Life.”
“People don’t need enormous cars, they need respect,” Vicki Robin writes in the latter of these. “They don’t need closets full of clothes, they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and beauty…People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, and joy.” To try to fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems.”
At the time, and ever since, the couple has contributed — with no off button — everywhere they have felt inspired to help.
They’ve served on more than a dozen nonprofit boards, chairing a number of them, and volunteered with agencies from Point Lobos to SPCA Monterey County to the local Veterans for Peace chapter, where Butler is president emeritus.
“When I came home from Vietnam, I made up my mind to do something better,” Butler says. “I wanted to help others and the Earth.”
But after reading those two books, the couple decided to intensify their work with higher education scholarships.
“We made the decision we wanted to give back in education,” Baldock says, and when UROC founding director Bill Head invited them to learn more about a budding research center at CSU Monterey Bay, another turning point materialized.
“We were just impressed and we were both interested in science,” Baldock says. “These kids were bright and really wanted the education. We committed.”
Back in 2011, Kevin Marquez Johnson thought he knew where he was going.
He was a fresh-faced community college transfer at CSU Monterey Bay eager to study biology. He wanted to be a medical technologist in a hospital, full stop.
Then came a turning point.
Science faculty members Suzanne Worcester and Aparna Sreenivasan told him about UROC and the unique opportunities available there. Johnson was game, if only for a simple reason: magnification.
“I was hesitant at first,” he says. “But I was interested because I could get experience on microscopes to help prepare me for hospitals.”
The next thing he knew he was studying harmful algal blooms in lakes in Watsonville and Santa Cruz, learning how to preserve samples, bring them back to the lab, press them, gaze at them up close and use genomic methods to determine if the phytoplankton was toxic.
“I didn’t see it as an opportunity for a career. Then I got to try it and started thinking I want to do more of this stuff—it was fun,” he says. “Their support really catalyzed my continued focus on research.”
Natasha Oelman helps run UROC, and finds that arc familiar.
“We know students aren’t aware of the opportunities at UROC and how it might shape them,” she says. “That’s exactly why we have an outreach coordinator who works closely with faculty who are doing research. Where Johnson is now is very much shaped by his UROC experience.”
Johnson was the first UROC student Baldock and Butler supported with a scholarship.
In the ensuing dozen years, the couple have backed 20 more students in the sciences, many of whom have gone on to earn multiple graduate degrees and competitive national grants.
The two have become such steady supporters of Otter scholars, the UROC staff has a three-symbol shorthand for their scholarship: the B&B.
To get where he is now, Johnson earned a National Science Foundation grant for his doctoral research at UC Santa Barbara — made possible with support and strategy from UROC — where he studied ecology, evolution and marine biology. After that, he received another grant for post-doc studies tracking oyster survivability in changing estuaries on behalf of Louisiana State University.
Johnson now works as an aquaculture specialist with the California Sea Grant extension program, based on the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus. He directs a formidable lab with three master’s students and three undergrads, teaching but also advancing aquaculture science for the seafood industry — and healthier ocean habitat— around the world.
He finds one of the most exciting elements of his work is counseling members of his team on more than, say, the life cycles of newly hatched oysters in Morro Bay.
“It’s cool to take students in and guide them through career paths, provide them with that relationship where we can talk about their futures and their goals,” he says. “How can I help you get there? What opportunities do I have in my lab?”
In other words, he’s cultivating more and more turning points. Somewhere Bill Head, Aparna Sreenivasan and—yes—Baldock and Butler are smiling. They all had similar conversations with Johnson.
“It’s so rewarding to get to know the students and to watch them grow,” Baldock says. “We are so impressed by their dedication. It’s so much work, which goes well beyond CSUMB. That’s what UROC’s all about.”
Oelman echoes that, with an emphasis on gratitude for B&B. “The amount they’ve been involved and support and believe, not just in the students but the programs, encouraging them to gain research experience, and to bring that back into the community to do that much more good,” she says, “I consider them UROC family.”
Their involvement leads to a number of profound turning points, and—for students like Johnson—reflections on the bigger picture and giving back.
“The meaning of life is to do your best to help other people,” he says, “without focusing too much on yourself.”
