I’ve always loved music. My mother has one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. She’s never been professionally trained; she just enjoys singing, so when I was a child, I started singing with her! It always felt right to me. If people come up to me after a gig and ask, “How long have you been singing?” My mom replies, “Since she could talk.” I believe her because I truly don’t remember a time in my life that I wasn’t singing my little heart out as often as I could to anyone, everyone, and even no one but myself. I started playing the piano when I was in the 7th grade. A family member of mine had a little keyboard in their home, and I just started playing it. I was just playing little nonsensical melodies, but I loved it. Not long after that, my parents bought me my own little keyboard. It was a cheap little Yamaha with unweighted keys that lit up when you pressed them, and I could not get enough of the thing. I began watching videos on YouTube of piano tutorials for songs I liked. I learned them and began to accompany my voice with the piano. If the song I liked didn’t have a YouTube tutorial, then I’d search to see if I could find tabs and use my ear for any licks that may be in the song. Eventually, my parents put me in private lessons where I truly started to gain a better idea of how to read sheet music and understand music as a whole. During this time, I was also in my middle school choir, and music continued to feel right! I got a job teaching a choir class for an after-school music program my freshman year of high school and bought myself a better keyboard. I then started to play the drums, guitar, ukulele, bass, alto saxophone, and I plan to continue picking up every instrument I can. I want to continue learning more about music because there is no greater joy than sparking a love for music in others. I’ve worked multiple jobs teaching music and loved every job I’ve worked. I want to continue allowing myself that joy and sharing it with others. When it comes to the question of “Do I see myself playing jazz?” The answer is yes. I love jazz. I’m not a particularly talented jazz instrumentalist, but I love vocal jazz. Part of the reason I chose to attend San Jose State is because of their jazz classes. Vocal jazz, Latin jazz, jazz improvisation, etc. I grew up listening to all types of music, but the one my ear always leaned to was jazz. Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, and Ray Charles were my favorites. I made my own composition of Georgia to perform for my community college’s extravaganza showcase the year I graduated. I love singing jazz, and playing jazz is also amazingly freeing when you come up with something that sounds just right, but I plan to continue becoming a better jazz instrumentalist with my time at SJSU.

I live in Salinas California. It is a small farming town with a high Hispanic population. I am very lucky to have parents who raised me to put education first. I love learning. I love music. I love my community, and I hope to help bring up my community in any way I can. I’ve worked many music jobs all around Salinas with people of all ages. I worked in a small school called John Gutierrez Middle School for a few months last year (2024). I was not expecting to love that job as much as I did. “Middle schoolers… this is going to be tough,” I thought to myself. I wasn’t entirely wrong. Many of the students I was working with have parents in gangs, and the expectation of these parents is for their children to follow in their footsteps. Many of the students were very rude and disrespectful initially. They had multiple “long-term” substitutes who left early because they were so difficult to manage. Since I do not have a degree outside of my AA yet, I had a licensed substitute teacher in the room with me, along with two of my colleagues from a local studio. We got to know the students. We left our door open during lunch and let them spend time with us, play instruments with us, and talk to us. It was wonderful. After about two weeks of working there, they finally trusted us when we said, “We’re staying here until the end of the school year.” More than that, they liked us! The most difficult class was the Music Technology Class. This class had previously been a Music History class. Music history is a hard subject to make interesting for middle school children, so when we got there, the students were entirely disengaged from the class. They were loud, they were rude, and they didn’t want to participate. However, as I said before, we got to know them and they started to like us! They began turning in assignments we gave to them and even having fun doing them. We had them adjust audio files, create their own music using samples, and learning how to use special effects in music software. Many students had found a new outlet for themselves. They enjoyed making music. I saw their demeanors begin to shift for not only myself and my colleagues in the classroom, but all of their instructors on campus. They would show us the musical projects they were working on in the software that didn’t have to do with the class work we assigned. By the end of the year, many of them thanked us for taking the time to work with them. There are so many more stories from my time at John Gutierrez Middle School that made me think, “I truly can have a great impact on our youth,” but that classroom was definitely the most significant. I hope to continue my education and learn more about my field of study so that I can come back to working in Salinas California, and help more students realize there is more to our community and themselves than what the world beyond our classroom door says they are. The students in my community are not bad students or bad people. There just aren’t enough teachers who care to help them see their potential.