When Steven Garcia (PhD ‘23) was in high school in California, he didn’t want to go to college. As his mom tells it, he would have preferred to play video games and sports all day, like many other teenagers.

“My family was dragging me kicking and screaming to go to undergrad,” Garcia says. “Now I’ve been in college for 11 years. It’s been a switch, for sure.”

The switch was triggered when Garcia started helping out with a lab during his senior year of undergrad at California State University, Fullerton. He was conducting some movement assessments for the basketball players on the university’s rec and club teams, and a faculty member came in and asked if he’d like to help out with research on ACL injuries. 

As he worked with people who, like him, loved to play sports, who told him stories about how they’d recovered from this serious injury in order to be active again, he felt surrounded by similar minds.

“I’d always found things I was interested in, and they were video games and sports,” Garcia says. “Then it became science and sports.”

Garcia would become the first person in his family to complete an undergraduate degree. But his achievements didn’t end there. He’d go on to be one of few PhD students in the country to receive his own grant from the National Institutes of Health. Known as the F31 grant, it took care of his funding for two years as he studied how ACL reconstruction and high body mass together influence knee health and walking biomechanics.

“When I submitted the grant, I was trying to temper expectations,” Garcia says. “At the end of the day, I knew it’d be a really rewarding process, no matter what happened. Even if it got discussed and scored, even if it didn’t get funded, at least it got past the initial screening.”

When the scores and reviews came back, Garcia realized he might need to raise his hopes a bit higher.

Holy shit, we might get funded, he said to himself, the positive feedback on his computer waking him up amid the stupor of his silent apartment. Holy shit, this is sick.

“It was the middle of COVID, and we’d all been cooped up for months,” Garcia says. “It was one of those things where it felt like I was dreaming.”

Garcia partially credits a grant-writing class he’d taken through the U-M School of Social Work for his success. Taught by professor Matthew Smith, the course walked him through how to write each section of the grant.

“There were PhD students from all different backgrounds — Engineering, Kines, LSA — and the professor did a great job of making it palatable to everyone,” Garcia says. “It was a lot of fun but it was also a good learning experience to hear from someone who’s gotten grants on how to formally write a grant. It’s a completely different writing style from how to write a manuscript because it’s very, very short. You’re trying to pack as much information into a very short word limit, and there’s a lot of challenges trying to do that.” 

The effort paid off for Garcia. He successfully defended his dissertation in August and is working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Biomechanical and Clinical Outcomes Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago. 

He’s not sure yet if he’ll work in industry or stay in academia long-term but says his experience mentoring three students his final semester, including two in U-M’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, was so rewarding that he’s keeping open the possibility of an academic job.

His parting advice to those students and others involves the same recommendation his master’s advisor at Cal State Fullerton gave him: apply to everything.

“It’s good to get the experience of writing all these grant applications,” he says. “It made writing my papers and my dissertation much easier. When people ask what to do, I always say, ‘Try to write something.’”