Eleven Scholarship

“That sounds like a great idea!” Miriam, the co-founder and executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance, said. “We’d be happy to host it on our website.” No sweeter words had been sung to my ears. I almost couldn’t resist the urge to jump and scream—an act that would have undoubtedly left me with a torn suit and a dazed audience. This was a milestone in October to a journey that began in June. Rejection after rejection after rejection. My college reaches had shown me why they are called reaches. I had no backup plan. Not because I didn’t apply to safeties—I applied to multiple—but because I was an undocumented student. When most schools said “100% financial need meet,” they didn’t mean me. I was not eligible for their scholarships or grants or loans or work-study. In April, as a low-income student, my chances of going to college weren’t looking good. After about a week of wallowing in self-pity, I decided to begin my college search and application process again—from scratch—with the small number of schools that were still accepting applications. I searched through the jungle of information, much of which was not publicly available information, for specific policies on undocumented students. After a mentally destabilizing time for me, I secured admissions with a fairly affordable cost of attendance. Regardless, my experience was not fun. It was unduly burdening, and I was determined to ensure other students like me didn’t go through what I did. I began by mentoring a fellow but junior undocumented student through the application process. While the experience was good, with her having just received a full-ride admission to Washington University in St. Louis, I felt like I could and should reach more students. Late in June, I realized that the biggest problem for me was information and misinterpretation of admissions/financial aid policy. Having discussed with my friends, this wasn’t a me problem. Thousands of students around the country were most likely struggling with the same problem. I decided that to tackle the problem, I would create a centralized database/information resource for undocumented students. I got to work immediately, extracting the emails for admissions offices for a few hundred schools to an excel sheet, creating the questions to be asked, designing the webpage where the information would be displayed, and finally reaching out to the schools whose contact information I had. Using mail merge, I sent personalized emails to schools, stored replies in an excel sheet in the same workbook, and created an access query to merge relevant information. I then exported the information to a text file and created a program to extract the information from the text into HTML files for each school. I then created a presentation and reached out to schedule a meeting with the President's Alliance, and there I was, pitching the plan I had conceptualized and was executing myself. There are many ways to exhibit leadership. Taking the initiative is my way.