www.quepasa.osu.edu
and extracurricular interests and try new things as well. 2. Seek out role models: You may find that Latina faculty and staff are rare, but when you do encounter them, get to know them! Go to professors’ office hours; make a point to introduce yourself to Latina staff members or graduate students. Apply this practice beyond just other Latinas, though. If you encounter people in your chosen career field or in an area that interests you, get to know them and ask questions about how they got through college and transitioned into their work life. 3. Make your education meaningful: Give back to those who follow: Nothing can be more rewarding or valuable about your college experience than doing things that have a great impact not only for you personally but for others around you, whether that be your family (younger siblings, primas/cousins), classmates, or the broader community in Central Ohio. We should all remember that our path to the university is usually not an individual achievement but the culmination of the efforts of many—those who blazed trails
and opened doors for us in the past (the “first” Latinas in our discipline, in our career field, in our communities who endured even more difficult conditions to make it possible for us to be here today). We should recognize and honor those women who came before us (including our mothers, grandmothers, hermanas, tías, madrinas, etc.) by continuing to do the same for those who will follow. Mentor high school, middle school, or younger girls. Advocate for them. You may be the one who helps them get to college! We owe it to ourselves and our communities to ensure that we continue to open doors for the girls and young women who will hopefully follow in our footsteps. In this way, we can continue to increase the numbers of Latinas in higher education and the professional world.
Su Opinión
economic necessity requires daughters to contribute to household economies. Some families may emphasize that daughters should prepare for marriage and child rearing rather than pursuing higher learning. In other cases, it can be an economic challenge for parents to sacrifice daughters’ immediate financial contributions to the home for the longterm investment of a college degree and higher earnings in the future. Although neither of these issues applies only to Latinas, they certainly play a role for some Latina college students. Women in general continue to face gender norms and expectations that men may not face or may experience differently. Similarly, deciding on a field of study and future career may present tensions with family expectations. In some cases, family can emphasize particular vocational expectations for daughters, such as that one should pursue a lucrative career in medicine, business, or law. This often reflects the educational systems of Latin America where young people study a carrera or training that leads to a specific practical career such as accounting, nursing, or journalism. It can be hard to explain to family why you are passionately interested in communications, history, or anthropology—fields that may not so obviously lead to a specific job after graduation or a huge paycheck down the road. Being “the only one”: Latinas are still severely underrepresented in many fields; it is still all too common to be the only woman, the only student of color, the only woman of color, for example, in an engineering class, as an architecture major, on your dorm floor. It is easy to feel the isolation of not having other colleagues, peers, and especially senior role models who look like you, share a common background, or understand your perspective and experiences. Given these and many other challenges that Latinas face, a few words of advice are in order: 1. Establish and cultivate support networks: This should include friends and classmates here on campus and/or back home or at other colleges. Maintain old friendships and develop new ones. These can be through ethnic and gender specific groups like Bella (a Latina undergraduate/ graduate group) or Shades (a group for LGBTQ students of color), just to name a few, or they can be through service or academic groups. Pursue your intellectual
Winter Quarter 2011
25