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Alumni Profiles

Diana Alvarado (Merrill '19, Marine Biology)
Alvarado is the first in her family to attend university. She says peers in Rialto, where she grew up, wouldn’t consider marine biology as a possible career path.
Adilah Barnes (Cowell '72, Individual Major in Black Theater, Theater Arts Department)
An award-winning actor with over 50 years of film, television, and stage credits, Adilah Barnes is known to television audiences for her role as Anne Marie on ABC's Roseanne for six seasons.
Lizbeth Leon Beltran (College Ten '20, Sociology and Art)
My high school didn't have a lot of resources but because of the influence of passionate and caring teachers, starting from my elementary years, I was able to overcome many of the obstacles of not knowing how to pursue a higher education.
Margarita Davalos-Arias (Kresge '20, Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology)
By gaining confidence in myself through self-growth, the support from my family at home, and friends in Santa Cruz I graduated in Fall 2020.
Ángel De Jesús (Oakes '19, Sociology)
As an undergraduate, I was a transfer and re-entry student. I went to Mission College in Santa Clara, California.
Hector Arroyo De La Paz ('19, Legal Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies)
From a young age, Hector Arroyo De La Paz knew college would be a part of his future. While his parents didn’t attend themselves, they stressed the importance of a college education, taking him and his sisters to visit several campuses around California. “It was not about if I wanted to go to college but what school I would go to,” he said.
Bianca Azucena Del Toro (Merrill '20, Intensive Psychology)
My name is Bianca Del Toro. My family is very important to me. I grew up in a single-parent home in Inglewood, CA. Growing up, my mother has been the most hard-working and loving person I know.
Reina Garay-Solis (Rachel Carson '20, Psychology)
First-gen student Reina Garay-Solis is doing undergraduate research to help identify common challenges for first-gen and underrepresented students and find effective institutional practices to address them.
Diana Leon Garcia (Oakes ‘20, History and History of Arts & Visual Culture)
I was born in Oaxaca, Mexico and am an indigenous citizen of a Zapotec pueblo. I migrated to the U.S. at a very young age with my parents and grew up within a low-income home in Arcadia, CA where I lived with my immediate family of four and five other distant family members in a tiny two bedroom apartment.
Anabell Vidanes Gimena (College Ten '19, Community Studies w/ focus in Health Justice & Sociology)
My mother immigrated to the United States in the 90s and my father in the 2000s. I was born and raised in San Francisco and lived in a house filled with multiple families, often having to sleep on the floor to accommodate everyone in the house.
Eyra Gonzalez (College Ten '18, Environmental Studies)
I came to the United States at the age of nine from El Salvador and lived in San Francisco since then. For 10 years I lived in the Mission District. I attended Mission High School where I was involved in community service events and sports!
Reyna Grande (Kresge '99, Creative Writing and Film & Video)
Award-winning novelist and memoirist Reyna Grande attended UC Santa Cruz after her junior college English teacher urged her to leave the urban confines of Los Angeles and try living somewhere different.
Ray Gutierrez (Oakes '18, Film)
A university education can be more than classes, tests, and essays. Last summer Ray Gutierrez’s coursework took him to India, where he filmed a documentary about hearing-impaired students facing a gut-wrenching choice between family and opportunity.
Amy Pei Ling Hong (Merrill '99, Psychology and Sociology)
My two older brothers and I were born and raised in San Francisco to parents who immigrated from Hong Kong. My parents are high school graduates who learned of the American grading system when we entered public school.
Rafael López (Oakes '05, Women's Studies)
A few years ago, as Rafael López, then a White House senior policy adviser, addressed an early-education and high-tech crowd in Silicon Valley, he realized the land on which he stood was where his mother and grandfather had once picked fruits and vegetables as farmworkers.
Stephanie Barron Lu (Kresge '18, Psychology)
Life has been a whirlwind adventure filled with hard work, tears, sacrifice, love, and dedication to my family and my community. I am truly grateful for the opportunities I was privileged enough to receive thanks to my parent's hard work, and sacrifice immigrating to the US from Mexico and Guatemala.
Terri McCullough (Oakes ’91, Politics)
I will never be able to explain the incredible impact my experience at Oakes had on me. To meet so many different people from so many life experiences was an awakening.
Heddy Menendez (Stevenson '20, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology)
I was born and raised in Echo Park. Being a first-gen student has given me a new level of confidence in everything that I do.
Adolfo Mercado (Kresge '98, Anthropology)
As the son of Mexican migrant workers who met in California, Adolfo Mercado says one of his earliest memories was of picking tomatoes in the field with his family.
Shelly Meron (Stevenson '05, History with a Minor in Journalism)
I immigrated with my family to the U.S. when I was 11 and did not speak any English at the time. I spent middle and high school in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Stephen Harris Preston (Rachel Carson '20, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology )
I am the only child of two working-class parents who made me their priority amongst immense financial struggle spanning most of my childhood and adolescence.
Ada Recinos (College Ten '15, Sociology)
Ada Recinos’s Salvadoran mother and grandmother were on her mind when the 26-year-old was sworn in as the city of Richmond’s youngest council member in 2017.
Damaris Serrato (College Nine '20, Intensive Psychology)
I am a first-generation psychology student. I am originally from Guadalajara, Mexico but my hometown is Salinas, CA.
Darrick Smith (Oakes '96, Sociology)
In 1992, Darrick Smith graduated from high school. In that same year, his hometown of Oakland had 175 homicides.
Shannon Wong (College Ten '19, Sociology and Business Management Economics)
The greater opportunities motivated me to go to college. I knew that I needed greater technical skills to be able to make a career in business in my hometown of San Francisco.