A diligent, hardworking student, and community activist, I come from two special and marginalized populations that are well represented in California: refugees and immigrants from Central America and the LGBTQ community. I was raised by a single mother, an immigrant from Guatemala who worked as a housekeeper while I was growing up in an urban Southern California environment. My school life was difficult from the beginning. Between Spanish being my first language and my mother working long hours, I oftentimes felt lonely. As a gay, Hispanic man, I suffered a great deal from bullying in school because of my feminine characteristics and disposition. From elementary through middle school, I was called terrible names and sometimes physically assaulted. This experience affected my ability to perform my best in school; and in the end, it resulted in me being retained in the fifth grade.
A school psychologist would have been very beneficial for me. Someone to talk to about my problems. Someone who could have advocated on my behalf with the teachers, to let them know how I was struggling. Fundamental to my choice of career is my desire to protect children and youth from the kind of abuse that I endured in school and be a source of support. By my junior year, I had dropped out of high school. Disenchanted with education, I just wanted a paycheck to help my mother. If I had had someone to turn to for school support, my destiny might have been different. I might have excelled academically much earlier on. As it was, after leaving high school, I spent a decade working in retail, sorting and folding clothes, cleaning, etc. Although I eventually became a supervisor, it would have been much better to have entered college sooner.
Nevertheless, I did make it back to school, earning my high school diploma and Associate of Arts Degree at the age of 27. During my time at the University of California Irvine, I volunteered in an after-school program for students from low-income families, located in the same area where I grew up and went to school. Thus, it was a pleasure to help K-12 predominantly Hispanic/Latinx students from my community. I also participated in an education abroad program at UCI and was able to study for one semester at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, further enhancing my appreciation for multilingual and multiethnic society, where my worldviews, multilingual capacity, and celebration of diversity and multicultural competence were heightened even further. Now, I am close to finishing my master’s degree in School Psychology. This makes me the first individual in my family to attend college and the first to rise to the level of post-graduate education.
As a Latino member of the LGBT community, I look forward to contributing to diversity in my profession. Optimistic about the prospect of excelling in your program and making important contributions to class discussions concerning educational research, I will arrive all fired up for the many fascinating multicultural and multilingual experiences that I look forward to sharing with my peers. My identity and life experiences have influenced me to research and explore areas relating to culturally and linguistically diverse students. For my dissertation, I would like to focus on the effects of the increasing numbers of minorities entering the field of School Counseling, as both students and professors, reviewing the arguments dealing with the way that cultural and linguistic differences impact psychological and educational assessment, consultation, and academic and behavioral intervention.
I hope to find ways to increase multicultural competent practices through research, analyzing factors of culture and race when making judgments about special-education eligibility decisions for ethnically and racially diverse students. I believe my experience and future goals align well with the mission of the Department of CCSP, helping to ensure diversity and inclusion in the achievement of academic excellence. I look forward to fully utilizing my unique experiences as tools for creative problem-solving from diverse perspectives.
Sample Diversity Statement for Graduate School