This past month I had the chance of visiting Los Pinos High School and I enjoyed sharing my academic passions and study abroad experiences with Junior High students. I remember being their age when I first started the process of application to study in the United States. My life was hectic and on top of classes I had a busy agenda that included extracurricular, volunteering activities, and standardized admissions exams.
The most challenging thing for me throughout the whole process was to find a place to call home that was affordable for my parents. Through exhaustive hours of study and research I was able to find a college that was not only academically challenging, but inspiring and empowering as well. Three months after graduation, I began to attend Smith College, a women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts that offered me a scholarship that covered up to 90% of my education, included housing, food and health insurance.
My time at Smith College has been one of personal and professional growth. Although quite frightening at the beginning, the International Baccalaureate program from Los Pinos High School has allowed me to take the most advanced courses at the intro level. The IB gave me the confidence to become a molecular neuroscientist. My career involves elucidating the molecular mechanisms that give rise to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s disease, as well as addictions and neurological disorders. During my time at Smith, I have been able to take advantage of science-related opportunities beyond the classroom that allowed me to attend a summer research program at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution.
As a senior, I am currently doing my honors thesis on early detection of Parkinson’s disease, while being an active member in the community through the national leadership program of BOLD women’s network. This program has helped me find my own voice as a minority student in a predominantly white campus, and it has made it possible for me to raise awareness and validate the experiences of underprivileged students at Smith. In my free time, I love performing with the Latin dance team at the University of Massachusetts and hanging out with my friends that have also left their homes to pursue their dreams.
My future plans include attending medical school here in the United States. However, before that I will be working for two years in a neurobiology lab at Harvard Medical School in collaboration with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. There I will study the role of interneurons in diseases like schizophrenia and epilepsy in order to create drugs to treat these disorders. None of this could have been possible without the academic and personal encouragement I received at Los Pinos high school. The values I learned inside those classrooms have been my moral compass throughout these years. I have always been immensely grateful to God, this school, and my family for allowing me develop into the person I am today.
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