Johni Rose Zamorano is a first-gen student majoring in English with an emphasis on creative writing and a minor in psychology. A senior and a transfer student, she is documenting the experience of having her first year on campus, which is also her last. For her, and about 1,500 other senior transfer students whose first year was remote, graduation is rushing towards them like a double-decker Unitrans bus.

I’m still amazed that I made it here. 

Tuan Tat’s journey to the University of California, Davis began 68 miles away. It might as well have been another world.

Growing up in Oakland, California, a city he experienced as “a destitute land of hustlers,” Tat was influenced by the local culture to focus on making money rather than pursuing higher education.

This article originally appeared in the Graduate School of Management Blog. Original Article

When I was seven years old, my brother Max and I got our hands on a fun set of candies. Engraved on the flat surface of the circle-shaped lollipops was a short message, sort of like a fortune cookie. I forget what my brother’s “fortune” was, but mine was pretty cool. It said: “Viajaras pronto,” Spanish for: “You will soon travel.”

You have to be better than us: These are words that I heard often when I was growing up. My family made incredible sacrifices that have afforded me the education I have today. Most of my ancestors worked in physically-grueling jobs for menial wages, and my great-grandfather worked so hard that he passed away from exhaustion. My parents had to drop out of community college to support their own parents.

I grew up in a rural logging town in coastal Oregon. I come from four generations of loggers and log truck drivers. In high school I was exposed to geology by a teacher on a field trip to the beach that left me with a set of questions: "Why are there sea shells in rocks on the top of the mountain? Why are those rocks tilted on their side?" 

Sometime during high school, I decided I was going to go to college to study geology.