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"As I awaited my decision from UCI’s admissions office in 2018, I received my second DUI and was jailed multiple times for fighting, public intoxication, and disturbing the peace. As a result, I began part of my first quarter at UCI on house arrest and spent some nights in jail. This made me feel as though I did not belong on campus. Fortunately, I met Hector from the Underground Scholars Initiative (USI) in the first weeks of the 2018 fall quarter before I began my house arrest, and he made...

“UC Irvine was a totally different encounter from my community college experience. Honestly, it has its pros and cons but just the simple fact that I had gotten as far as I did makes me appreciate the campus a lot more. My experience at UC Irvine turned phenomenally more fulfilling after I found the Underground Scholars of UC Irvine, I felt like I was at home again. Words cannot explain the feeling inside of me when I met the men and women that genuinely understand my struggles due to their...

As a first-generation Chicano on my father’s side and second on my mother’s side, I was raised between two cultures. My parents met in Mexico City and when they came over to the states, my father began his journey employed as a gardener while he and my mother lived with my grandmother. My parent’s split when I was 8 years old, largely due to my father’s alcoholism and my mother returned to college soon after where she received a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Irvine (UCI) and...

I came from a nice middle-class family. In 1969 we moved into a predominantly white neighborhood. We were one of two LatinX families on our street. At 10 years old everything changed when my mother died. My only sibling (my sister) moved out 2 years later, and my father did what he could to raise me. Latch key kid by 12 years old. I was always looking for acceptance, fell in with the wrong crowd, moved out of the house when I was 17. I dropped out of high school my junior year with a 0.12...