Students Go Home to Texas for the Summer
Through the Home to Texas program, 38 first-year students completed paid internships in their hometowns.
In the furthest points of South Texas, the setting sun touches the waters of the Rio Grande and the dry brush of mesquite grass all at once. Laredo, Texas, which sits right on the river, is like a beginning and an end to the state’s reach, depending on which direction you’re going.
Growing up in Laredo, sophomore Ashley Nieto said, meant experiencing a tightly knit community even with a population that approaches 270,000. She remembers school days when chatter traveled fast and grocery trips seemed to involve everyone she’d ever known, but even still, she said people cared about one another. Her pediatrician, who saw her through the growing pains of childhood and her teenage years, always made a point to remember Nieto’s volleyball games and life events.
That added level of care is what set her on the path to becoming a doctor in the place that raised her.
“It’s a little role in the big community, but I think of it as a cycle. When a doctor moves on, you have to have someone replace them, and that doesn’t always happen in Laredo,” Nieto said. “Coming back home would be like cutting that cycle.”
This summer, Nieto had the chance to do just that. As a member of The University of Texas’ 2026 Home to Texas cohort, the public health major traveled back to Laredo to complete a paid summer internship in the city’s health department with backing from the UT initiative and community partners.
Home to Texas is an annual program that places first-year students within public organizations, such as city governments, economic development offices, school districts, or airports as well as nonprofit organizations and private companies that have a strong community impact in their hometown. During the program’s first year in 2019, there were initially 5 partner communities, with the numbers growing to 44 by 2023. Of the 38 participating students in this year’s group, six matched in Laredo across departments in the health, transportation and development sectors. Supporting this number of students was made possible by a generous donation.
In addition to the internship experience, the students participated in a weekly online training call with their peers in the program to grow their professional skills. Each student also had the opportunity to complete a Google AI Professional Certificate intended for increased fluency in artificial intelligence tools. Nieto said these resources provided through Home to Texas made a big difference.
“The added support definitely sharpened my skills,” Nieto said. “It was cool because I would have my training class and then wake up in the morning and be able to apply those skills to my internship the next day.”
For nine weeks, Nieto worked alongside some of the professionals she’d known all her life as a once-frequent visitor to local clinics with her mother. The experience of working in the health department, she said, granted her insights into the impact she could have in the community with the knowledge she’s gaining at UT’s College of Natural Sciences over 200 miles away.
“You grow up and you’re like, ‘we need more of this, we need more of that,’ but then you go get your degree and you never come back. That never gets solved,” Nieto said. “I want to be someone that actually goes back.”
Another student from Laredo, Isabella Ramirez, returned home in hopes of applying what she’s learned in her studies at the McCombs School of Business to her internship with the Laredo Webb County Area Metropolitan Planning Organization. There, she had the opportunity to conduct outreach with the community, lead presentations and attend a national trade summit.
“This internship truly changed the way I think about my hometown.”
Isabella Ramirez
Along the way, Ramirez said, she gained new perspectives about her own day-to-day life as a resident.
“This internship truly changed the way I think about my hometown,” Ramirez said. “With my internship, I understand how transportation planning really shapes the community we live in. No matter where my career takes me, I feel like having that understanding will make me a better student, a better professional, and a better citizen.”
Throughout the experience, Ramirez successfully proposed and launched an initiative to involve students from local schools in the decision-making that happens at the metro planning office. The idea, she said, was to empower students to provide feedback about policies shaping their roads, bike routes and other transportation resources.
“Stepping into something so unfamiliar was one of the best decisions that I could have made,” Ramirez said. “The fact that the transportation team believed in me while I had zero years of experience gave me a level of confidence I didn’t even know I had.”
In addition to her internship, Ramirez applied her training to her second job at a local Pilates studio. There, she put her newfound knowledge in AI to the test and created a streamlined process for onboarding employees that reached the head of the company and landed her a conversation with a team at Google.
With the students spread across the map throughout the summer, Home to Texas celebrated their collective work on Sept. 24 with a showcase presenting highlights from their respective internships. Nanami Buchanan, a computer science sophomore, said she appreciated seeing the success of her peers throughout the internship process.
“Seeing all of my fellow cohort members, it really made me happy to be a part of something like that,” Buchanan said. “I knew that I was grouped with a bunch of other ambitious leaders.”
Nearly 30 minutes from her home in San Antonio, Buchanan got the opportunity to explore another side to being a local through an internship with Prytime Medical Devices Inc. in Boerne.
In Buchanan’s previous experience with programming, she had never dealt with medical terminology or software, but she said the team at Prytime was quick to bring her on board to dive into the new concepts. Soon, Buchanan saw that her work could have practical implications.
“I realized I want to work with something that has an actual impact,” Buchanan said. “That motivated me to get out of bed and go to work every day because I knew that what I was working on could potentially save a life.”
By the end of the summer, Buchanan developed an update to the company’s simulation app that models the procedure of inserting a balloon catheter. With the app, users can practice the technique before entering a fast-paced trauma bay in the real world.
Buchanan said many people envision that a career in computer science requires moving to technology hot spots like Silicon Valley or New York but realizing the impact her code could have at home opened her eyes to new possibilities.
“As we grow up, we always have these aspirations of going to a new place. We always want what we don’t have,” Buchanan said. “Being able to come back home, and seeing these small places that have great ideas that could potentially change lives and change the future of medical technology, was huge to me.”
After completing their summer internships, the students returned to the Forty Acres for their sophomore year, but many, like Ramirez, were left with a lasting impact. During the next couple of years as Ramirez wraps up her degree at McCombs, she said she plans to look toward law school before ultimately returning to Laredo to work in the legal field.
Since her schoolyard days, Ramirez has been involved in various community and volunteering efforts in Laredo. The Home to Texas experience, she said, was just another way of giving back to the community where she grew up.
“I truly hope that more students take advantage of this opportunity,” Ramirez said. “Our hometowns benefit when students come back and invest in the place that invested in them.”
What makes these students proud of their hometown?
Ashley Nieto, LAREDO
“The area code, 956. I feel like that’s what I’m most connected to: when people are from South Texas.”
Nanami Buchanan, BOERNE
“The downtown is very unique, you can see so much of that German-American heritage being preserved. If you go around with a local, they’ll be able to tell you the history.”
Isabella Ramirez, LAREDO
“I’m really proud of Laredo for taking on the Home to Texas program. I’m proud of the local organizations for opening up their doors so that more leaders would want to come back home.”
To learn more about Home to Texas, including how eligible students can apply and how employers and communities can get involved, visit UT’s Career Success website.
