I'm Jasmine, a Guatemalan, first-generation law student at Northwestern Pritzker, and everything I want to do with a legal career traces back to a summer someone spent listening to people who don't usually get asked. I grew up in Compton in a Guatemalan household, watching my parents build a life in a country that never made it easy for them. College wasn't handed to me as an expectation. It was something I had to figure out how to want, and then figure out how to reach, with no one at home who'd walked that path before me. That's given me a particular understanding of what it means to serve people the systems weren't built for, because I've spent my life translating between two of them: the one my family came from and the one I was trying to enter. That understanding sharpened into purpose during my Judicial Fellowship at LA Superior Court, where I researched youth recidivism and provided translation support for Spanish-speaking families trying to navigate a courtroom that offered them no map. I watched families who looked like mine try to make sense of a system that assumed a fluency, in language and in process, that no one had ever taught them. I decided then that I wanted to be the kind of lawyer who removes that barrier instead of standing behind it. I carry that same instinct into every part of my legal education. I focus on juvenile justice and education equity because I believe access to justice should never depend on where a person was born or which family raised them. This summer, I'm interning at the ACLU of Southern California's Education Equity Project, where I research legal protections for immigrant families in early childhood education settings and work on a special education due process matter for a student denied the services he was legally owed. I've also built training materials for early childhood educators so they understand the rights of the families in their classrooms, particularly the immigrant families who often don't know those rights exist. Earlier in my path, I worked on Central American asylum policy through a Congressional internship and supported first-generation students through UC GEAR UP, both experiences that taught me the same lesson from different angles: people don't fail because they lack ability. They fail because no one built them a door. I plan to build doors. My goal is to work as a civil rights attorney, ideally back in California, close to the communities that raised me, focused on education equity and the rights of young people caught in systems that were never designed with them in mind. I'm working toward an ACLU fellowship and eventually a staff attorney role where I can take on that work directly, and I hope, someday, a clerkship that lets me understand the law from every angle before I spend my career trying to bend it toward fairness. I don't come to this work as an outsider looking in. I come to it as someone who has lived on both sides of the door, and who knows exactly why it needs to open wider.

Mental health matters to me because I've lived what happens when a system ignores it, and who pays the price. My dad struggled with addiction, and I watched what happened when that struggle met a criminal justice system built to punish rather than treat. He needed help. He got a cell instead. Watching that unfold as a kid taught me early that incarceration doesn't fix what's underneath it. It just delays the reckoning, and it costs a family everything in the meantime. That's part of what drove me to the LA Superior Court for my Judicial Fellowship, where I worked on Teen Court and researched youth recidivism. I wanted to understand the system that had shaped my own family, and I wanted to find the place where it could still be changed. What I found confirmed what I already suspected. So much of what looks like defiance in a courtroom, or in a classroom, is really an unmet need wearing a different face. A student in crisis gets suspended instead of supported. A suspension turns into missed school, missed school turns into falling behind, and falling behind turns into contact with a system that was never built to help anyone heal. That's the school-to-prison pipeline, and it doesn't start with a crime. It starts with a kid nobody caught in time, the way my dad was never caught in time. I know that pattern from the inside, too. I have ADHD and PTSD, and I know what it's like to sit in a classroom that wasn't built for how my brain works, carrying a story most people around me couldn't see. That experience gave me a real stake in education equity, not an abstract one. I don't advocate for students who struggle because I read about them. I advocate for them because I was one, and because I know how much difference it makes when a school chooses to understand a student instead of just managing them. I carry all of this into my work now. As a law student focused on juvenile justice and education equity, and through my internship at the ACLU of Southern California's Education Equity Project, I work on the exact intersection where my dad's story and my own converge: how schools respond to students in crisis, what protections exist for kids with disabilities, and how quickly a system can fail a child who needed support instead of punishment. I've worked directly on a special education due process matter for a student denied services his IEP required. I've also helped build training materials for early childhood educators on the legal protections owed to their students, because the earlier adults understand what a child needs, the less likely that child ends up where my dad did. I want to keep doing this work as an attorney. Every kid who gets suspended instead of supported, every person who gets a cell instead of care, represents a system that chose punishment over prevention. I've seen what that choice costs. I want to be part of choosing differently.

Being first-generation means I walked into college without a map. My parents didn't grow up with FAFSA forms, office hours, or the unwritten rules that tell other students how to ask for help. I grew up in Compton, in a Central American household where college wasn't a given. It was a dream. Every step I took, from filling out my own applications to figuring out what a "syllabus" even was, I took alone or with strangers who became my guides. That kind of independence teaches you fast. During my Judicial Fellowship at LA Superior Court, I sat with Spanish-speaking families trying to make sense of a courtroom that wasn't built with them in mind, and I translated not just language but confusion into something they could act on. Nobody trained me for that. I learned it by doing it, the same way I learned everything else: by showing up and figuring it out. I learned to ask questions without shame, because staying quiet meant staying stuck. I learned that asking for help isn't weakness. It's strategy. The hardest part wasn't the coursework. It was carrying two worlds at once. At school, I had to learn new language, new expectations, new ways of thinking. At home, I stayed the same daughter, the same sister, the same person my family always knew. I was often the one translating for my own family, not just words but systems: what a court date meant, what a form was actually asking for, what a deadline could cost if we missed it. I didn't want to lose either world. I just had to learn how to hold both. That tension shaped what I care about now. I saw, growing up, how little support kids get when the systems meant to help them don't know their names. That's why I chose law. I'm a first-year at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, focused on juvenile justice and education equity, the fights that shape whether kids like the one I was get a real shot. This summer, I interned at the ACLU of Southern California's Education Equity Project, researching legal protections for kids in early childhood education settings and writing know-your-rights materials for the same kind of families I grew up around. I want to work as a civil rights attorney, ideally back in California, close to the communities that raised me. I know what it's like to need someone in your corner. I want to be that person for someone else. This scholarship would ease a real weight. I didn't get here by accident. I got here by refusing to let "no one in my family has done this" mean "I can't do this." I plan to keep proving that wrong, for myself, and for the kids I'll represent someday.

My first childhood memory should have been precious, but instead, it's me on top of my father, punching his head as he did the same to my mother. I grew up watching him get arrested for domestic violence, watching my mother absorb blow after blow, and not understanding until much later what that kind of violence does to a family long after the police leave. I didn't understand it because no one named it. Not my teachers, who saw a "difficult" kid and never asked why. Not the doctors, who saw behavioral problems and never asked what caused them. Not even my own family, who were surviving their own version of the same thing and had no language for what any of us were carrying. It took twenty years and a diagnosis of complex PTSD in my sophomore year of college for everything to click. CPTSD comes from prolonged trauma, not a single event. Mine started in a home where intimate partner violence was the norm, and it shaped how I moved through the world for two decades before anyone gave it a name. I share this because I think it's the piece of the intimate partner violence conversation that gets lost: the kids in the next room. IPV doesn't end with the person it's directed at. It moves into the children who witness it, who internalize it, who sometimes repeat it, and who show up in classrooms and courtrooms years later carrying a trauma no one has diagnosed. When I worked as a site lead for the Bridge Project in Sacramento, dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline, I saw that pattern constantly: kids labeled as behavior problems who were actually responding to violence at home. When I researched Teen Court recidivism rates as a Judicial Fellow at the LA Superior Court, I saw it again. The system was set up to punish the symptom and ignore the source. That's the gap I want to close. I'm now a 2L at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and I'm interning with the ACLU of Southern California's Education Equity Project, where I work on how schools respond to trauma and crisis in children's lives. I've come to believe that ending intimate partner violence requires more than protecting the immediate victim. It requires building systems, schools, courts, and social services, that recognize the children in that house as victims too, and that intervene before a kid becomes a statistic instead of a case file. With my legal education, I want to work on the policy side of that gap: pushing for trauma-informed protocols in schools, advocating for stronger legal protections for children exposed to domestic violence, and making sure family courts and education systems talk to each other instead of working in silos. I've lived what happens when those systems fail to connect. I know firsthand what it costs a kid to grow up unseen. I'm going to spend my career making sure fewer kids have to.

At 16, I stood by my mother's hospital bed, overwhelmed with guilt. I had been caught tagging on school property, a foolish decision that had lifelong effects. My mother had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and her body could not take the stress. It sent her to the emergency room. Witnessing her pain, I realized the extent of the damage I was causing. I swore I would never hurt my mother, especially after watching her endure years of domestic abuse from my father. Though my actions did not directly harm her physically, they landed her in the same place he had sent her. Determined to break this cycle, I vowed to create a different future for my mother, my siblings, and myself, one filled with change, reform, and freedom. What I have not always talked about is what was underneath the tagging. By then, I was using drugs and alcohol to cope with things I did not have words for yet: my father's addiction and the abuse he put my mother through, the instability at home, the pressure of growing up faster than I should have had to. I told myself I was fine because I was still going to school, still functioning. I did not see it as following my father's path, but that is exactly what it was. The night that sent my mother to the hospital was not separate from that pattern. It was part of it. My decision to get sober started almost immediately after that night. Although I have never followed a formal program, my church, family, and community have been what has kept me sober for the past couple of years. Since is staying in therapy, which I have done consistently for five years, and staying focused on my goals and my family, sobriety has been the best. I think people sometimes expect recovery to follow one script. Mine did not. It looked like showing up to therapy even when I did not want to, and like reminding myself, on the harder days, exactly what I was working toward and who was counting on me. Recovery did not erase that night. It gave me the chance to build something from it instead of being defined by it. I carried what I learned, that addiction can hide behind a functioning exterior, that the people struggling with it are still whole people, into the work I have chosen. I am now a law student focused on juvenile justice, work that exists because I know what it looks like when a family's hardest moment becomes a turning point instead of an ending. My father's addiction shaped my earliest understanding of what happens when no one intervenes in time. My own experience taught me what it takes to intervene anyway. I do not share this story often, but I am not ashamed of it. Addiction is part of my story. It is not the whole of it, and it is not the end of it. I plan to spend my career being the intervention for someone else that I eventually had to become for myself.

Growing up in Compton, CA, I watched my father cycle in and out of the criminal justice system. His struggles with addiction meant I spent my childhood learning how few second chances the system offers people who need them most. My family also had mixed immigration status, which taught me early on that a person's access to safety and opportunity often depends on paperwork they had no say in. As a kid, all I knew is that the adults who helped us, teachers, community organizers, our public defender, and counselors, were doing something different from the adults who processed us like case numbers. That distinction is why I want a career in the nonprofit sector. I want to be one of the people doing something different. In college, I worked full time to pay for school, which taught me discipline, but it was the Panetta Congressional Internship that showed me what public interest work actually looks like day to day. I focused on Central American asylum policy under the Migrant Protection Protocols, reading case files that could have described my own relatives. Later, through the Bridge Project, I consulted on school-to-prison pipeline issues and stepped into a leadership role I did not expect to hold. I learned that the pipeline is not an abstraction. It is a set of specific decisions, a suspension policy, a missed IEP meeting, a school resource officer call, that nonprofit and legal advocates can actually change. My time at the LA Superior Court as a Judicial Fellow sharpened that lesson. I researched restorative justice models through teen court and translated for Spanish-speaking families navigating a system that was never built with them in mind. Watching a parent understand her child's case for the first time, because someone finally spoke to her directly, showed me how much of justice work is simply making sure people are heard in a language and process they can access. This summer, interning with the ACLU of Southern California's Education Equity Project, I have worked on protections for early childhood education providers facing immigration enforcement, and I drafted a policy analysis of one district's response to enforcement activity near schools. I have seen how a single memo or training session can give a teacher or a parent something concrete to act on when they are afraid. That is the kind of impact I want to keep making: not abstract, but specific enough that someone can use it the next day. I am now a law student focused on juvenile justice and education equity, with plans to keep working at the intersection of the two. I hope to spend my career representing young people and families who, like mine, have had more contact with punitive systems than supportive ones. I want to write the memo that helps a school administrator make the right call, argue the case that keeps a kid in a classroom instead of a courtroom, and build the kind of trust with a community that lets people actually use the resources meant for them. My father's story could have become mine. Instead, it became the reason I chose this work. I want my career to make sure that more young people get the version of the story where someone stepped in early enough to matter.