A Queens College Student Goes From Boilers to Dartmouth Medical School Chris Navas needed a course that met at the right time in the evening and would not interfere with his day job, which was building boilers, or his daily obsession, which was building his body. That was a little over three years ago. He was making good money at a factory in Maspeth, Queens, forming new boilers from sheet steel as if it were clay, rolling it, shaping it, cutting it. He visited the gym fervently. His class work at Queens College was fitted into patches of time around boilers and barbells. "They had a night class, a 200-level psychology class," Mr. Navas said. Behavioral neuroscience. It worked for my schedule. The teacher, Giuseppe Cataldo, then a graduate student working on his doctorate, "was a younger guy, hip, telling us about all the research that was going on in the world," Mr. Navas said. He told us about monkeys controlling robotic arms just using their brain, and how they can control mice with joysticks. Stuff like that. Suddenly, Mr. Navas, a high-school dropout and a do-just-enough-to-pass college student, found himself reading unassigned chapters in the text. One day, Mr. Cataldo took the students to a nearly windowless building that Mr. Navas thought was for storage. It was actually filled with laboratories. "Pain research," Mr. Navas said. Research with cocaine and drugs. The research that I liked was with learning and memory, which was Dr. Susan Croll's area. He went to work in Dr. Croll's lab, was accepted into an honors neuroscience program and, as of this summer, will be moving on from Rockmills Steel Products, the boiler company where he has worked for more than 10 years. The next stop for Mr. Navas, 30, is the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. "Dartmouth Medical School," he said. That's a big seat. For now, he works part time in a hospital and is still on call with the boiler company. "I don't know what we're going to do without him," said Mary O'Brien, a member of the family that owns Rockmills. He's good at everything. Mr. Navas didn't think he would be good at neuroscience. "The mentors made the difference," he said. I was just some kid working in a boiler company. I had no vision of becoming a doctor. I got lucky, over and over. True, but not true enough. A high-school dropout and drop-in, Mr. Navas had a knack for figuring out how things worked. The youngest of three, he was raised along with his brother and sister by their mother, Brianne Navas, who supported them with jobs, welfare and great expectations. Mr. Navas said his father left before he was born, and the family had lived in six neighborhoods by the time he was 18. With every move, he said, "I had to reinvent myself." AFTER high school, with no particular plans, he got a job as a secretary at a refrigeration company that serviced supermarket equipment. One day, all the mechanics were out in the field when a job came in. The boss sent him out with a cellphone and a toolbox, and told him to call after he had popped open a panel on the balky refrigerator. "Basically, I learned refrigeration by telephone," Mr. Navas said. His mother, sister and friends nudged him to go to community college in Nassau County and take classes, even if he didn't know what he was going to do. He was hired at the boiler company, which builds boilers in pieces and then assembles them. "If there's no elevator, you have four guys holding a 400-pound part with monkey wrenches and carrying it downstairs," he said. After community college, Mr. Navas started from scratch at Queens College, planning to earn a degree in exercise science. "I met my girlfriend in a class that both of us had taken by mistake," he said. More luck. The girlfriend, Lauren Talesnick, now his fiancée, encouraged him to switch to a psychology major and escape a tangle of course requirements. Then came the behavioral neuroscience class. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Navas and seven other graduates from the City University of New York will receive the first installment of an $8,000 scholarship named for Jonas E. Salk, who developed a vaccine for polio in 1955. Dr. Salk, a graduate of the City College of New York, was offered a ticker-tape parade by the city, but declined and said the money would be better spent on scholarships for medical students. Mr. Navas lives a block from his mother in Great Neck. How has she taken the news? "She has bought every single Dartmouth shirt that they sell," he said, "and she tries to drop it into every single conversation."