Contrary to the prevailing advice when I was growing up, I felt that ARC gave me the toolkit and self-confidence to handle the academic rigor at places like UC Davis and Princeton. Personally, my experiences in community college led me to believe that more people should attend community college first. At the very least, I'd have a lot more debt and probably be more cynical about the prospect of higher education otherwise. Now, I have the opportunity to do so, and I can definitely say that despite the turmoil I went through to get here, I wouldn't be at this point without ARC and I'm forever grateful for that experience. It was there that I learned not only that it was possible for me to love school, but that I might want to give back and teach or research myself one day. As a first generation student who grew up poor and often was told by teachers that I was a disappointment (or that I had potential but didn't apply myself), my experiences at ARC with such kind and passionate faculty were incredibly healing and life-affirming. I also got the wonderful opportunity to present my thesis proposal at the Emerging Scholars Conference at the University of Michigan, which helped introduce me to more amazing scholars in my cohort and faculty across the discipline. While writing my thesis I was also awarded my first fellowship via the American Political Science Association's Minority Fellowship Program.

To that end, I also recently accepted an offer to attend Princeton University this fall to pursue a ( fully funded!) PhD in American Politics with an emphasis on Black politics, class conflict, and political behavior. Last quarter I completed my senior honors thesis on Black respectability politics in the US Congress, and I plan to continue researching this and related topics in graduate school. Through a variety of research experiences and extracurricular activities here – including doing stories for the university radio station and working on a documentary about institutional racism – I found my home in studying American politics. Now, I'm finishing up my last quarter at UC Davis, where I transferred in 2019. Were it not for the scholarship the school awarded me to attend two years in a row, I might have never found my love for poetry and likewise my love of making music/rapping. Plus, Professor Collihan made it fun, which always makes learning and engaging easier (I'll never forget the classes I took with her as well)! Similarly, it was through the creative-writing festival hosted at ARC, SummerWords, that I learned how much I loved writing. While my other responsibilities ultimately prevented me from being able to go to the MUN conference, the experience of getting to work with others in an extracurricular academic context pushed me to continue doing so at UC Davis. Even though I was working in AmeriCorps as a VISTA and still at-risk as far as housing, I decided to join MUN – which is run by Professor Collihan – during my last semester at ARC. Likewise, growing up, the opportunities for academic clubs like Model United Nations (MUN) were pretty limited or inaccessible for me – but it was at ARC that I came to see their value. It was through these reaffirming experiences with the amazing professors at ARC that I, as someone who hated school growing up (I had something like 120 absences throughout high school), ultimately became the student and person I am today. Professors like Frank Araujo, Kathleen Collihan, and Betty Chan all advised and mentored me at the most difficult and isolating times in my life, and I can never thank them enough for that. These difficulties ultimately left me homeless/at-risk for a large portion of the time that I was attending ARC, but both during this period and during the period which led up to it, I met some of the most amazing and inspiring professors who were always willing to stay after class to chat with me. Moving here alone brought with it some great struggles that I couldn't have foreseen at that age, but which had a profound impact on me personally. I started at American River College in January of 2016, when I was 18, after moving to Sacramento from Williamsburg, VA on my own. Jasanté Howard Alum / 2018 / Political Science / American River College

'ARC gave me the toolkit and self-confidence to handle the academic rigor at places like UC Davis and Princeton.'

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