Student Spotlight: Miriam Rodriguez
College junior Miriam Rodriguez spent the majority of her childhood in the Bay Area, after immigrating from Mexico when she was six years old. Rodriguez watched her parents attend adult high school in California and achieve their GED in their 40s (an impressive feat)--something that solidified her desire to go to college from a young age.
However, she knew that she would need a lot of help to get there due to her parents’ lack of knowledge of American education systems and her family’s financial limitations.
Rodriguez credits her academic success to the teachers and tutors who helped her throughout her primary education, especially since she didn’t speak English when first started attending American school in the first grade. Although she pushed herself in school and got good grades, she wasn’t able to take many APs or participate in extracurricular activities because she worked to support her family for all 4 years of high school–first as a cashier at a gas station and then as a server at a burger joint. Her outstanding work ethic and high ambition represented her potential, but high school transcripts only displayed half her story.
Rodriguez’s introduction to the Reach Foundation came during her time at Santa Clara High in her school’s AVID class. The Foundation came to her class to help her and her peers write college essays and prepare them for life after graduation. Rodriguez remembers that “the class wasn’t able to help us provide accountability very much but the Foundation was able to fill that gap, especially since there was 1 mentor to 5 students. We got a lot of 1:1 support that we had never received before.”
She graduated high school in 2020 and her mentor Tracy Young encouraged her to go to community college, be in the honors program, and transfer to one of her dream schools. Rodriguez spoke incredibly fondly about her relationship with Tracy, explaining that “Tracy has been my mentor from senior year of high school till now and she genuinely is just someone I can talk to about anything”. In fact, when Rodriguez was accepted to her dream school UCLA two years into community college, Tracy was one of the first people she told. Although her parents may not have had the best understanding of the significance of her accomplishment, Tracy knew how hard she worked and how big of a deal this acceptance was for her.
Now, in college, Rodriguez emphasized that the Reach Foundation’s financial support for her education has been extremely vital to her ongoing success; “without it”, she said, “it would be very difficult for me to attend UCLA right now.” The Reach Foundation pushed her to grow outside of her comfort zone and fulfill her dream of leaving her hometown and attending a big university. Rodriguez explained that it was very unlikely for women of her background to be able to leave their homes for higher education, so her experience has been one defined by empowerment and inspiration.
Miriam Rodriguez is the first person in her family to go to college–something she sees as a huge responsibility but also a huge point of pride.
And stories like Miriam’s are only possible with the support of external resources like her teachers, mentors, and the Reach Foundation. Providing disadvantaged students with tools that their privileged peers are born with is necessary in order to lessen the inequity present all over the United States and especially in the Bay Area.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who [don’t have enough].”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt