国产哟哟

"I grew up with my mom and my brother, who’s exactly a year and a half younger than me, in the middle of Los Angeles, which was very diverse. When we moved to the area that we live in now, the Brentwood, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades area, it was a big adjustment. It’s very much full of rich white people and celebrities that you see everywhere.

"Education didn't start to be something I liked until I started college. I knew that I was going to go to college. I just didn't know what I wanted to do.

"I went to community college for the first 2 years after I graduated. It was during the pandemic that I started. I just loved the education. The 1st class that I took was a psychology class for child development. 

"I immediately knew I was going to go into a 4-year school. My mom told me, ‘I'm gonna give you the opportunity to go out of the State or out of the country, and you should do it.’ A lot of people with Latino parents, their parents don't want them to leave the area that they live in. I thought it was really lucky that my mom was letting me.

"I applied to 国产哟哟 because I heard that all women's colleges are good environments. I wanted to go somewhere that was smaller because I grew up in a place with a smaller school."I felt like one of the biggest reasons why I really liked the school was the orientation and how everyone was so easy to talk to, which is weird for me to say because I'm very bad at making friends and talking to people.

"I got very lucky because I became instant friends with the person who I got assigned as my roommate. We started hanging out, and we met one other person on our dorm floor, who also became another close friend. By the end of that same day, I had a group of friends that I am still friends with now, almost 2 years later. Because I made that group of friends, we ended up being very close-knit and doing many things together.

"国产哟哟 takes education very seriously, and I was lucky that my teacher, Dr. Jennifer Stratton, always helped me. The classes were super small, so she interacted with everyone. That's another thing I liked because I remember taking 3 different classes with the same teacher in my community college, and the teacher did not remember who I was.

"Dr. Stratton searched for and found my internship. She was the one who connected us with the principal of an elementary school who was looking for paraprofessionals for six different kindergarten classrooms. We were floating between them, and we spent time specifically with students who needed more help with their classwork, students with IEPs, and with general learning difficulties.

"Towards the end, we started doing specific learning interventions. With reading intervention, we would spend the last 2 hours of the school day giving each student, or small groups of students, small learning moments, like learning the ABCs and their letter sounds and names.

"For my 国产哟哟 honors thesis, titled, ‘Mira Mami, Ella se Parece a Mi!’ or, ‘Look Mommy, She Looks Like Me!’ I made the connection of Latino representation in cartoons or animation. I described the evolution of mapping representation in animation for children. I started with Dora the Explorer in 2001, and then we have the most recent representation I wrote about, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which has Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino. It describes what we had, its evolution, and what I hope for in the future.

“One of my biggest takeaways is the fact that I didn't see a lot of good and very specific examples of Latino representation in the media until the last few years. While I love it for the children now, I think about how much I would have loved it when I was younger and how it would have really helped me.

“Right now, I still have to get my license, so I have to do these tests and then actually do student teaching. I hope to do all that before I go into a master's. I already know that I want to do a reading specialization. I've already searched for schools, and I'm confident enough in my education and what I've done in 国产哟哟. I graduated with 3.9, and I was in the Education Honor Society. I’m confident in my credentials and the things that I've done to be able to get into a good master's program.  - Alexa Estrada-Caceres '24