students

Falling in love with learning

Zepeda’s academic trajectory first veered from the norm at 16, when he dropped out of high school to attend community college full time. A self-described “emo” outlier in high school, the Goleta, California native preferred the autonomy of college, including the ability to customize his classes according to his own nascent curiosity. He earned his A.A., and, through a special transfer program, squeaked into UCSB. The move to the university was challenging — more tests, more work, more everything. But through a daily routine of long hours at the library, Zepeda began to find himself.

“I really fell in love with school and learning when I got to UCSB,” he says. The library’s eighth floor, sparsely populated for most of the school year, had tables where he could spread out and windowed walls looking out across campus, with the ocean in the distance. “It felt like a room of my own. It was magical,” he recalls. From that refuge, he dove into the rich stories and cultures of his comparative literature courses.

Then, inspired by his Holocaust Literature professor’s passion for her topic, Zepeda hatched a graduate school plan he describes as his “’Legally Blonde’ moment.” “I want to go for a doctorate!” he remembers thinking in a lightning-fast decision that echoed when the film’s lead character suddenly decided to enter law school despite minimal preparation. Eventually he decided on a master’s in English literature and raised his sagging GPA to 2.98 — close enough to SF State’s 3.0 requirement to get him admitted — conditionally — to the English Department. Even though he met his goal, scraping by yet again was deflating, and it took its toll on Zepeda’s self-esteem.

“Learning to allow myself to be myself — that’s what was hard, in the beginning,” he recalls. “In Santa Barbara, I felt like my life needed to follow a script. Even though I was overcoming some difficulties,” he says, referring to financial struggles and an emerging awareness of learning disabilities, “I was still really hard on myself.”

More course-changes

A year spent saving up money and organizing his financial aid helped smooth the transition to graduate school and SF State, and Zepeda knocked out his course requirements in two years. But when it came time to write his thesis, burnout set in. To take a break but still stay connected to school, he enrolled in a certificate for teaching reading to adults and became involved in extracurricular activities, serving as an officer in student organizations for English and comparative literature.

Thanks to that self-granted two-year extension, Zepeda not only finished his thesis, but his forays into campus leadership led to an editorial internship with the city — experience he parlayed into an editorial job right after graduation, at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP), based at Alliant International University.

The irony is not lost on Zepeda that it was his time spent away from his degree work that set positive events in motion. “My burnout led to doing student leadership positions, which led to an internship, which led to a job,” he says, retracing his erratic trajectory. Writing your own script, he was discovering, could be a really good thing.

Finding ‘home’

Sold on the value of getting involved, Zepeda joined CSPP’s multicultural committee, where he found role models, including Janie Pinterits, who directed the school’s master’s in clinical counseling program. “She had a spirit of wanting to advocate for the people with least amount of power in a situation,” he says, inspired by Pinterits’ ability to call out injustices. “I didn’t know that you could do that — I didn’t know you just stand up for something you believe in, fearlessly,” he says, adding, “Seeing that modeled in a way that wasn’t aggressive, and was more uniting — that was something I wanted to be able to do.”

Recognizing that a professional degree created the means to achieve that end, he started taking classes in Pinterits’ program. When his contract ended — along with the free employee classes — heading back to SF State for a counseling degree made sense. “What I love about San Francisco State is it just represented a sense of home,” he says.

He especially liked that SF State’s numerous specializations within the counseling program — there are six — allowed him to learn about the variety of professional directions his classmates were heading in. A double-coincidence of two CSPP faculty members, Tiffany O’Shaughnessy and Alison Cerezo, moving to SF State at the same time he did, added to the comfort zone. Professor Julie Chronister, his academic advisor, offered feedback and encouragement, sometimes extending office hours to accommodate his schedule. Chronister says Zepeda uses her input to strengthen his counseling skills, knowledge and attitude. “He is a quiet yet powerful voice for accessibility, social justice and cultural and disability competence,” she says of his passion for helping underserved populations, many of whom face barriers he himself had to overcome.

Embracing the journey

Looking ahead to a spring graduation, Zepeda, now 33, hopes to work in a community mental health facility and launch a small practice where he can provide culturally sensitive, trauma-informed care. Now that his professional career is on track, are his herky-jerky days over? Probably not, he laughs, explaining that a gerontology focus somehow led him to a clinical practicum working with children. “But I’m embracing it more.”

Zepeda’s story is most remarkable for what it isn’t — it isn’t about grand, long-term goals or dramatic sacrifices to reach them. It isn’t about the labels that might be applied to him: learning-disabled, Latino, gay, and from a low-income home — though, he notes, those dimensions of his identity have certainly informed his life experience. Mainly, Zepeda defines his story as following the road his love of learning has taken him on so far, and letting go of judgment when he didn’t have highest GPA or the fastest finish time, or even a firm grasp on where each change would take him.

“You have to capitalize on those pivotal points,” he now understands, “and maybe not write off things you didn’t think you’d do.” If he can be a model for others, he says, “I want people to be comfortable with who they are, and feel that sense of home-ness.”

The advising anchored a slate of services Martinez received in the program and helped her choose the classes that she needed without spending unnecessary time on ones that wouldn’t count towards her major. Not only did she finish her undergraduate degree in four years, but she’s already completing her second semester of a two-year master’s program, also in kinesiology.

That pivotal email was from Student Outreach and Academic Retention, or SOAR, then a pilot program launching to serve the specific needs of low-income, first-generation college students like Martinez in their critical first year of school. Since the initial cohort of 30 students, SOAR has blossomed into a success story with a 97 percent retention rate, a 98 percent rate of solid academic standing, and, as of the Fall 2015 semester, federal funding that quadrupled the number of students it serves.

Students within SOAR’s demographics typically face myriad challenges — working more hours to contribute to family income, helping with younger siblings at home, dealing with outsized stress that descends when family needs combine with exam periods. Those factors translate to the highest dropout rate of any group of college students. A 2015 Pell Institute study found just 9 percent of students from bottom income quartile graduate with a bachelor’s degree by age 24, compared to 77 percent for the top income quartile. Among first-generation students alone, only 25 percent graduated within four years and 50 percent within 6 years, according to a 2011 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which also found that graduation rates at public universities lag far behind private schools.

“The quicker you get these higher-risk students through, the more likely they are to finish,” says CHSS Dean Alvin Alvarez, who, together with former Student Resource Center Director Jessica Kongthong, designed the program when he was the College’s associate dean. “We know that working alone can add one or two years to their education,” he says — time that can increase debt and decrease earning potential. “The more you drag it out the less likely there will be positive outcomes.”

Even when first-generation students have supportive families who value education, as Martinez did, once they arrive on campus, they typically lack a support system. “They often don’t have that kind of footing — brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles who can help them navigate at the institutional level. They get here and they’re all alone,” Alvarez says. “SOAR gives them somebody to walk the path with.”

More than advising

Current SOAR director Juan Carlos Gonzalez understands firsthand how the students he serves can lose their way. When he headed to San Diego State in the early 1990s, he met both the low-income and first-generation criteria. He felt lost. As he struggled, there were people he calls “instrumental” in helping him stay on track. “I feel like we are that entity for some of these students,” he says.

Student support goes well beyond academic advising. SOAR has tutoring available and offers its students priority registration — a benefit Martinez said made a big difference, though not in isolation. “If I just had the priority registration and didn’t have the advising, I wouldn’t have known what classes to choose,” she says. Academic requirements change as programs evolve, she adds, so having an ongoing relationship within her department kept her on track to finish in four years.

One of the services Martinez valued most wasn’t academic. She often talked to SOAR advisors when the stress became too much. “Many of our advisors have clinical experience, so they’re able to delve deeper than just grades,” says Gonzalez. “The social piece is a really strong part of the success of this program.” Advisors maintain a caseload and track student progress. If they see a student who’s not doing well, they engage in “intrusive advising” — a hated term but a useful tool, Gonzalez says. They “intrude” with emails, phone calls and text messages. “It’s the idea that we’re not just here to answer your questions, we’re here to support you,” he says, adding, “If you give us an inch, sometimes we’ll take the foot if we feel that’s something that you need.”

But the program can’t do everything. A student came to them in financial straits; she needed to help support her mother in the wake of her father’s death. But SOAR doesn’t offer direct grants. They hope to in the future, Gonzalez says, and in the meantime they point students to external opportunities. “That’s part of the services we provide — to say, ‘Even we don’t know, we’ll figure it out together.’”

Carolina Talavera Martinez with SOAR Director Juan Carlos Gonzalez and SOAR Academic Coordinator Taryn Wong.

A pilot that took off

SOAR got its start as a specialized program within the College’s Student Resource Center, which still serves all comers. But back in 2012, Dean Alvarez says, the College recognized that it was losing a lot of first-generation, low-income students of color who might not know the potential value of walking through that door. “We needed to be more proactive about reaching those populations,” he said. That meant structuring the initial program so that those students had to come in to get advising and mentorship.

In 2015, the SOAR team landed $1.1 million in funding from Student Support Services (SSS) TRIO, a federal program aimed at helping low-income Americans enter college. The College’s numerous health-focused majors qualified it for support aimed at STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). The change expanded SOAR to 120 active students, allowing the program to serve students for two years instead of just one, and including upper-division and transfer students. Disabled students became a third supported demographic, but two-thirds of enrollees must be both low-income and first-generation. That’s not a problem for CHSS — Alvarez estimates that 70 percent of the College’s student body meets that criteria.

“For every one student you’re serving, there are three others who need the services and aren’t getting them,” Gonzalez says. He plans to look for ways to increase the size of the program when he rewrites the grant next year. A separate SSS TRIO program serves SF State’s other majors.

Return on investment

The more students CHSS can elevate, the better, Alvarez says. He notes that there’s a generative effect — these students often circle back to serve society’s vulnerable populations. Martinez is a case study: Her graduate work is preparing her to address the health needs of Latinas.

But Alvarez emphasizes the greater good. “Programs like this nourish our future,” he says. “Many of these students never thought they’d get out of their neighborhoods, or out of the fields or out of a kitchen. So when SOAR succeeds, that means you’re getting a whole new generation of 120 students to think, ‘I didn’t think I could do this … now, what else can I do? Can I get that master’s or that doctorate? Can I become a physical therapist, a nurse practitioner, a physician?’”

With the right support, the program has already shown, such professional tracks go from being alien to being achievable. “That’s the empowering message of SOAR, that this is within you,” Alvarez says. “When a program like this is at its best, it opens students up to the possibilities in themselves.”

Jared Walker (left) and Naomi Kelly in San Francisco City Hall

The Willie L. Brown, Jr. Fellowship offers public-sector opportunities to students who have overcome obstacles

That chapter was a semester-long internship handpicked for Walker based on his career ambition to become a city manager. The Willie L. Brown, Jr. Fellowship connects talented, public-service-interested individuals like Walker — specifically, students who face barriers to opportunity — with public-sector internships, a $3,000 stipend and a support system to guide them.

Walker, a finance major who graduated this spring with a GPA just shy of 4.0, came to SF State through Project Rebound, a program that helps ex-offenders succeed on campus — he served three years in prison. He is one of 52 Willie Brown Fellows who have been placed in city and county government internships around the Bay Area, according to Raquel Pinderhughes, the fellowship director and a professor in Urban Studies and Planning in the School of Public Affairs & Civic Engagement, where the fellowship program is housed.

Support includes a weekly three-hour professional development seminar led by Pinderhughes. “The focus is on identifying professional strengths and weaknesses, preparing for informational interviews, written and oral communication, résumés, cover letters and discussing the issues that the students face in their internships,” she says. This includes ongoing counseling and mentorship for current and past fellows.

Partners at the City

And when Pinderhughes reaches out to people like City Administrator Naomi Kelly to place fellows, the answer is yes. That’s the original vision for the program, which Willie L. Brown, Jr. (B.A., ’55), the former mayor of San Francisco and former California State Assembly speaker, started in 2008. Pinderhughes works with seasoned city and county officials to find each fellow a position that directly facilitates his or her career aspiration, a laborious behind-the-scenes matching process she calls “the real secret behind our success.”

For City Administrator Kelly, mentorship is personal — Brown hired her right out of college, encouraged her to go to law school and guided her career as she moved through the ranks at the City. Her office regularly welcomes interns from throughout San Francisco’s neighborhoods. “If they want to come and work with me in the City Administrator’s Office and have an interest in public service, then I open up my doors.”

Walker is her office’s first Willie Brown Fellow. She ticks off some of the disjointed to-do list they exposed him to: measuring performance for animal care and control; developing policy to address the out-migration of African-Americans; evaluating software that measures the efficiency of the city’s fleets; working with different divisions on their budgets. “The array of topics he was able to touch on is kind of exciting,” she says.

Walking through the building’s Doric-column-lined corridors, Walker anticipated a weighty-sounding topic for his main project, so he was surprised to find that his work would focus on puppies and kittens. He soon learned that city management involves all facets of urban life — even ones with cute, furry faces. Working under Kelly’s budget and planning director Adam Nguyen, Walker analyzed a proposed change to the city’s animal vaccination schedule.

Nguyen says doing analyst work has enormous value for a future manager. “How many times do we vaccinate, what are the best practices, what are other municipalities doing around this? Then doing a cost-benefit analysis… and what are the tradeoffs and considerations along the way?” Gathering and assessing such facts yourself, he says, helps you to determine whether the information others present to you “is valid—if they’ve asked the right questions, if they have the information they need” to inform policy and operations-management decisions.

City managers pivot topics every hour or less, Kelly adds, so sharp analytical skills are important. “You’ve got to be able to think fast and on your feet.”

Nguyen also taught Walker that strong teamwork skills can make government more efficient. “Every step he showed me, ‘Now look, if you do this, you’re making it easier for the next person who has to pick this up and make something happen with this project,’” Walker recalls.

In addition to his project, he shadowed Kelly and others to a range of meetings, from listening to the mayor and department heads wrestle with public policy issues to reviewing purchase orders with division-based analysts. The internship, including the most challenging parts, strengthened Walker’s resolve to become a city manager.

Metrics of success

Based on the program’s success rate, his odds look good. All former fellows are either employed, applying to graduate or law school, or in a postgraduate program, Pinderhughes says.

 And she doesn’t limit the definition of success to public-sector jobs. One former fellow is an English Language teacher for new immigrants. Another helps secure loans for low-income housing. “Even students with jobs outside the public sector are doing work that serves communities in meaningful ways,” she says, proud of the program’s already considerable impact.

A dedicated network

The program is open to all SF State students, but the majority of applicants in the past year came from the College of Health and Social Sciences (CHSS), the program’s academic home. “Majors in CHSS are very directed to serving some of the critical needs in the city… public health, urban planning, housing, transportation, criminal justice reform, management,” Pinderhughes says. “They are well trained, their applications are strong, and their career goals are well defined.”

Something else the Willie Brown Fellows have in common is access to opportunities they wouldn’t ordinarily come by, including a network of influential people rooting for them to succeed. Supporters are dedicated because of their respect and affection for Willie Brown — and equally, Pinderhughes says, a deep belief in the program’s mission. “They are truly committed to the shared goal of getting people from diverse communities into positions of decision-making and power so that we can have representative government and services,” she says.

Naomi Kelly thinks cultivating such opportunity is just good governance. “The more diverse opinions you have around the table, the better your policy will be,” she says. “You need to have multiple insights into cultural differences.

Walker, who plans to get more work experience and then pursue an M.B.A., grasps the value of the doors being opened for him and his fellowship colleagues. “I think people are sometimes are written off — people just assume that you don’t have anything to offer because of what you’ve been through or where you come from. It’s all working against you,” he says. He calls the Willie Brown Fellowship and its many supporters “a counterbalance” to such routine prejudices. “This gives you the opportunity to show: That’s your past. What are you capable of now? What do you want your future to be like?”

Vida Sanford (left) and Ian Mosier

For a kid who hadn’t gotten much praise for his academic performance in recent years, Mosier says, “Going to the ropes course and being good at it, and getting positive feedback was very transformative for me.” Being a leader and helping others made him feel he was a part of something larger than himself, he says. “My sense of duty kicked in. I re-engaged with my school and with my education.”

Mosier not only graduated from Galileo, but following a PLI internship, he was hired to be a team leader and eventually became the PLI ropes course coordinator. He later completed two years in SF State’s Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration program.

A local stalwart

PLI delivers multiple success stories like Mosier’s every day. School- and community-based programs make up more than two-thirds of the Institute's Adventure Challenge Course clientele. PLI also operates summer programs, including leading the ropes course at the Taylor Family Foundation’s Camp Arroyo in Livermore, which serves children with life-threatening and chronic illnesses or developmental disabilities. In addition, PLI offers ground-level team-building and leadership games and initiatives, including mobile workshops it takes to client sites.

But the Fort Miley Adventure Challenge Course, in continuous operation since 1979, is the Institute’s marquee program. Last year 14,000 people, mostly youth, enjoyed PLI’s programs, with more than 10,000 of them participating in the Adventure Challenge Course. The success of the Fort Miley program has opened the door to discussions with the National Park Service, which manages the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, on an expansion plan that includes building a large group campsite and a universally accessible ropes course designed to serve those with disabilities.

PLI owes its long-term success to a business model that is primarily fee-for-service, and it has proven to be both sustainable and community-centered. Partner institutions like San Francisco Unified School District are repeat customers who write the Institute’s activities into annual grants. “We have a built-in audience with the different school districts and with different programs that use our services year after year,” says Drew McAdams, PLI’s chief of programs. “We’ve been able to be autonomous with that not-for-profit model.”

Vida Sanford is one such steady customer. A district coordinator for San Francisco Unified School District’s Mentoring for Success program, Sanford, who earned both her B.S. and M.S.W. at SF State, manages Project Arrive, a program supporting ninth graders as they transition into high school. Project Arrive’s small groups have been coming together for the ropes course challenge for the past five years.

“There are 50 ninth graders who have to learn to get along with each other for the next four years, so there’s a real value in having this experience together to help deepen their sense of community and trust,” says Sanford. The course offers kids something schools can’t. “We have a lot of kinesthetic learners in our cohort… they’re very physical, which may be the reason traditional schooling’s not working very well for some of them,” she says, adding, “It’s really beautiful to see them in action out there.”

The Ecology of Peer Leadership

What really makes PLI unique is the way its programs and clients engage with each other to create a rich, value-added ecosystem, with the various participants leading and inspiring future groups.

Mosier is home-grown in that ecosystem. His peer-leadership experience was part of PLI’s Youth Lead! training, which teaches teens to facilitate groups and lead ropes-course challenges. New cohorts shadow the veterans, then the veterans shadow the trainees as they gain new skills and confidence. PLI then hires on newly trained kids as leaders. It’s a process that feeds on itself, McAdams says. “As my mid-level managers start to mentor that other generation, it solidifies their skills, so they start to move up,” he says. “That diversity of leadership really works for us.”

PLI’s partners understand that value. “I love to schedule our ropes course on days when those older teens are out there showing what they can do as leaders.” Sanford says. “Our ninth graders love it, and it’s great role-modeling for them because they see, ‘Oh, that could be me.’”

McAdams works to enhance this mentoring further, trying to match visiting students with leaders who graduated from their schools. Such peer relationships “add another layer of cultural relevancy to the groups that we serve,” McAdams says. It’s a quality that makes PLI a rarity in outdoor education, a field often dominated by white males. At PLI, 75 percent of the leaders are people of color, and 95 percent of activities have youth in leadership roles. About 80 percent of all participants are under age 25.

“That whole idea of cultural relevancy — not only in the programming but in the staffing — creates a welcoming environment and breaks the ice,” McAdams says.

Staying Relevant

Jason Martinez was a student for whom those demographics made a difference. At 15, a period of transition had him living out of boxes with his mom and godparents, with no room of his own. He became more interested in being out with friends than going to school. His grades sunk.

He landed at Downtown High School, a continuation school for kids with credits to catch up on. But being at his new school made him feel like he’d done something wrong, he said, and he struggled to fit in. Then at an orientation program, a teacher from Get Out and Learn, an outdoor education-based pathway at Downtown High, gave a slideshow showing kids camping, hiking, and facilitating at PLI’s ropes course.

“I see all these inner-city youth — people who look like me — doing it and having fun,” he said. “I was like, wow, people in the city actually do this?” Kids from the program were at the presentation. “They shared stories of overcoming challenges and overcoming fears — that’s what drew me into the program,” Martinez said.

Soon he was at Fort Miley, scaling tall poles, then jumping off, swiping at dangling objects to test his limits. Far outside his comfort zone, Martinez says the challenges helped him located his self-confidence and make connections. He saw that just as he choose his own path down the cliff, his new school would help him get to graduation. “I learned I’m taking a different route and I’m going at my own pace… but I’ll get there,” he says.

Martinez earned his diploma and returned to work at PLI's ropes course, often sharing his story with new arrivals from Downtown High School. His PLI leadership experience with helped him see “how I’ve inspired other people just by being who I am,” he says, and led him to the education field. He worked with kids in after-school programs, and now, at 27, he’s enrolled at City College and, through an AmeriCorps placement, he’s working with Sanford at Mentoring for Success.

McAdams loves seeing such trajectories.

Mosier, who’s 34, is still applying PLI skills nearly two decades on. He’s returning to SF State, this time as a psychology major, and plans to go on to pursue a master’s in counseling. It was the ropes course and overall experience with PLI that guided him along that path.

Out on the course for team-building exercises with his master’s students, Professor of Counseling Alvin Alvarez, now dean of the College of Health & Social Sciences, observed a special aptitude in Mosier.

Mosier recalls, “Every year, he was like, ‘You know, Ian, you’d be a good counselor.’” It became an annual refrain. “You know, Ian, you’d be a really good counselor.” Finally, when Mosier re-evaluated his career direction after nearly two decades as a PLI leader, “I looked at my skills and my passions and I said to myself, ‘You know, Ian, you’d make a great counselor.’”

After all these years, Mosier says PLI and SF State professors are still changing his life. “I think that’s pretty cool.”