‘I Know Who I Am’ Parkland students redefine themselves, their lives at UCF
Fall 2018 | Volume 8 | Issue 1
Photos by Taya Britten Lauren Lee Marianna Wharry Rachel White Haley Wood
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In this issue of Centric we explore the idea of transitions in life. At its very core, Centric is about people. It is a publication set on giving a voice to a population of students and bringing them together in a common cause. As we searched for the answer to the difficult question of what ties us together, we discovered that no matter who you are or where you’re from, we are all transitioning in and out of the stages of our lives. We dedicated ourselves to seeking out the stories of triumph and new beginnings – the stories of those moving forward and moving on. Every story was chosen with care to ensure that it was bold, compelling and a testament to what our magazine stands for. For every story, whether it be of passionate alumni reaching for the stars or of men and women moving past their trauma and into a new life, we strived to document the hardships as well as the joy. UCF is home to over 66,000 students, which means that there’s 66,000 stories to tell. We’ve only scratched the surface, but we hope that these words shed a light on the diverse, inspiring people who make up our university.
Paola Peralta, Managing Editor
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Table of Contents
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For the Love of the Game International students come to UCF to chase their dreams
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Making Change through Unity
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Josh BoloĂąa and Karen Caudillo reflect on their status as DACA recipients
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Beyond the Game The bond formed between Johnny and Aubrey Dawkins through UCF basketball
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A Hope Restored UCF helps two men on the road to recovery 4 | Centric Magazine
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One Year Later After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rican students continue fighting for their island
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Cover Story: Life After Parkland Students write a new chapter at UCF after the tragedy that changed their community forever
Homeward Bound UCF serves as a home for those who have always sought one
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A Knight’s Claim to Fame UCF alumna Cat Ridgeway is reaching for the stars with music that inspires
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The Process of Painting See visuals come to life in the Advanced Painting Laboratory Centric Magazine | 5
UCF women’s golf junior and Mexican national Maria Balcazar practices her chipping at the Twin Rivers golf course as the team prepares for the Princess Anne Invitational. Photo by Ryan Weiss
For the Love of the Game Athletes from around the globe leave family and familiarity at home for a chance to boost their careers at UCF By Ryan Weiss 6 | Centric Magazine
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Waking up at 6:45 a.m. to practice into the late afternoon, immediately going to class, dealing with language barriers, eating foods you’ve never had before and being thousands of miles away from your family and friends. These are just some of the things international student athletes deal with every single day. Not only do they spend massive amounts of time on academics and sports, but they do it all while being in an unfamiliar country. Yet, even with so many factors making their lives hectic, they wouldn’t give up playing sports for anything. Without sports, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to attend UCF. All the way from Barcelona, Spain, senior women’s tennis player Natalia Serrano said she would have never come to UCF for college alone. “Being away from family is pretty hard,” she said. “I wouldn’t have seen the opportunity. I wouldn’t have known about it without sports.” Serrano had only been to the United States twice before she officially enrolled at UCF; once for her brother’s wedding, and the second time for her official recruiting visit. The hardest part for Serrano and many other international student athletes living in the United States is being away from their families. “Other people can go home for the weekend and [international student athletes] can’t,” Serrano said. “Like spring break, on the tennis team we have practice, but even if we had off, it’s not worth it. It’s too expensive to go home for just a week.” Being so far away from family also affects how players handle emergencies and deaths in their families. Maria Balcazar, a women’s golf junior from Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico, said she struggled a lot last year when her cousin died. However, Balcazar had just had wrist surgery one month prior, so she was able to go home. Balcazar said she is still struggling with her cousin’s death, but immediately after it happened, she questioned if she wanted to keep playing golf. “After the surgery and my cousin passing, that was the moment when I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Balcazar said. “She was like a sister to me. My will was like, ‘I go home and stay with family or I just break this through and just keep working like she told me and make my dream come true.’” Besides family, one of the biggest issues international student athletes have is acclimating to the language barrier. Serrano went to an English-speaking school in Spain for 13 years, but when she came to UCF, she had prob-
lems understanding some accents, including Southern accents. Men’s tennis player Mikhail Sokolovskiy, a sophomore hospitality management major from Moscow, Russia, also came to UCF knowing English, but he struggled to understand rapidly spoken instructions from coaches. Other aspects of culture shock players have experienced are in the interactions they’ve had with others. Sokolovskiy was surprised at how nice everyone at UCF has been while men’s soccer sophomore goalie Yannik Oettl, from Munich, Germany, said people in the United States and at UCF are much more talkative. So much so that it has rubbed off on him, and when he went home last year, he said his friends noticed. Food is yet another change that the players have had to adjust to. Not only do they no longer have homecooked meals, but the food they have to eat now and the things they find in stores are much different than what they were used to eating at home. In Serrano’s case, she didn’t have a car so she ate at the Student Union. “Not having what I’m used to back home, like my mom cooking for me, that kind of shocked me a little bit. I had to get used to that,” Serrano said. “It was more of like fried food and I don’t really eat that stuff at home.” Even with all of the differences and difficulties that come with being an international student athlete, none of the challenges would be worth sacrificing sports and the chance to go pro. For Sokolovskiy, college wasn’t even on his mind until UCF men’s tennis head coach, John Roddick, contacted him about the opportunity to play at UCF. After weighing his options between staying in Russia to try to become pro in his home country or to come to the United States to play at UCF, Sokolovskiy decided UCF would optimize his education and chance to go pro. “[In the U.S.A.] you can do [tennis and school],” Sokolovskiy said. “In Russia, you have to choose at a pretty early age when you don’t even know what’s going to happen. So I decided to come here and do both and see where it leads me.” Other players like Oettl are also here for a chance at education while still trying to go pro. Oettl suffered a shoulder injury while he was in high school, damaging his chances of going pro. Instead, he was able to come to the United States and be a student athlete. Sokolovskiy knows that playing tennis makes his life as a student harder, but for him and the other athletes, their love of sport is just too great to give up. More athletes next page
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Photos by Marianna Wharry Sarah Cavacini
What Brings You Here?
Jacinta Kendall, 19 Hometown: Sydney, Australia
Yannick Oettl, 21 Hometown: Munich, Germany
Abbie Pritchard, 20 Hometown:
Rowing has always been a part of Kendall’s life. She began at the age of 12, joining the rowing club as an extracurricular activity. It seemed fun and enjoyable at the time, but she had no idea where it would take her. While competing in Australia, she met coaches from UCF’s rowing team and began the process of coming to Orlando. “The diversity is really cool, there are so many different ethnicities. I came from a smaller school and seeing the amount of culture here is amazing,” she said. Her favorite part of being an international student is the jokes she tells other students when asked about her life back in Australia. “I think it’s fun to see what farfetched things people will believe. We’ll tell people that we ride kangaroos to school or that we have ferocious koala bears,” she said.
“Getting used to that summertime heat is definitely something I struggled with,” Oettl said. With the heat being his biggest struggle, Oettl took the new changes in stride. He described the new situation as exciting and worthwhile. Being a part of the soccer team made him feel like he had a built-in family and support system. “At first when you look at the number of students online, you’re like ‘Woah, there are so many students, but then you’re here in the summer and it’s kind of empty,” he said. “In the fall you can really see the difference and get to meet new people and different interactions.”
Coming from an all-girls school with 500 students to the largest university in the nation can be a big adjustment for anyone. For Pritchard, she took it all in stride, finding some of her closest friends on the rowing team at UCF. “Because I’m a part of the rowing team, I get to have 50 plus friends who love the same thing and have the same interests as I do,” Pritchard said. The biggest change for Pritchard came when understanding the impact the physical distance can have on relationships. “I talk to my family every day, twice a day. It’s not so much that I have a lot to say, sometimes I just want to call and say ‘Hey,’” she said.
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Wellington, New Zealand
International athletes share their journey from home to UCF By Marianna Wharry
Yoni Sorokin, 24 Hometown: Jerusalem, Israel
Richard Amon, 19 Hometown: Accra, Ghana
Caitlin Ross, 21 Hometown:
The first thing Sorokin noticed about UCF when arriving last year was the size. “Everything here is big and organized, which is definitely something we didn’t have back home,” he said. He came to UCF because of the opportunity he had for advancing his soccer career and found his home in his teammates, especially considering that his family remains in Israel. “They are definitely a motivating factor, and I strive to make them proud every day,” he said.
Having played soccer since he was eight, the first time Amon traveled outside of his native Ghana was when coming to Orlando to play for UCF in 2016. “Coming out of Ghana was a really big deal to me,” said Amon. Amon trusted the process and his new teammates, saying that it wasn’t a hard decision, and he found comfort in the school’s focus on the health and overall well-being of its students. “The UCF Golden Rule is something that aligns with my personal values and it’s something I found important when coming here… I value interpersonal relationships and UCF seemed to have placed emphasis on that,” he said.
Ross began rowing when her cousins introduced her to the sport, and she has not looked back since. She discovered her passion and found UCF’s emphasis on athletics and school spirit as a major draw to her decision to come to Orlando. “College sport isn’t much of a thing back home, and we don’t have nearly as many options as people do here,” she said. “Title IX [in the United States] is definitely something that contributed to us being here.” Title IX is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education, according to the U.S. Department of Education. When asked what her best advice was for students moving far away from home, she said, “Make use of all of the resources that you have and meet as many people as you can.”
Wellington, New Zealand
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Making Change through Unity Former SGA presidential rivals Josh Boloña and Karen Caudillo are making strides for immigrant rights By Haley Wood
Previous SGA presidential rivals Josh Boloña and Karen Caudillo stand outside of the Reflecting Pond. Photo by Marianna Wharry
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It was only last spring that the suspense of the UCF 2018 SGA presidential election unfolded before the eyes of a hopeful student body waiting for a change that might soothe the burn of the most recent national presidential race. After a close run between three pairs of candidates – Josh Boloña and Jad Shalhoub, Karen Caudillo and Theressa Tong, and Brad Kuehler and Breon Clark – the election was sent into a runoff election between Boloña and Shalhoub and Caudillo and Tong. As the two front-running candidates, 22-year-olds Caudillo, a political science and international comparative politics student, and Boloña, an industrial engineering student, were placed into the spotlight as not only opposites but rivals. When UCF students cast their final ballots last March, many did not realize the core identities that Boloña and Caudillo share. Boloña and Caudillo are two of almost 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were born in another country and were brought to the U.S. at a young age. Caudillo was only 4 years old when she moved to Naples, Florida, from Mexico and Boloña was 6 years old when he moved to Sunrise, Florida, from Ecuador. In an effort to protect undocumented children, such as Boloña and Caudillo, former President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012. Under the DACA program, recipients of benefits could apply for two-year work visas, obtain a driver’s license and live a life free of risk of imminent deportation. “When I was in high school I was completely undocumented and I couldn’t drive,” Caudillo said. “I couldn’t apply to college. I feel like I had to work 10 times harder than any of my friends to really try and get to college.” In 2017, the Trump administration was faced with a decision to continue the DACA program via executive order or to begin implementing permanent legislation. Not to the surprise of the DACA recipients – more commonly known as “dreamers”– the administration decided to end the program.
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It was soon after the program’s discontinuation that news organization NowThis produced a video of Caudillo speaking on behalf of dreamers all over the country. “I’m more scared for the younger people,” Caudillo said in the video. “I’m older, I have financial resources, I have some college education, I’ll get through it.” The video went viral, and Caudillo took her new-found internet fame with her to the SGA elections the following spring. Throughout the campaigning process, Caudillo and Tong did not hesitate to emphasize their diverse backgrounds and experiences. Many UCF students knew the story of the passionate undocumented Mexican transfer student from South Florida who wanted to make a difference not just on campus, but globally. It was the other side of the story that seemed to be blank. “We [Boloña and Shalhoub] are not very comfortable going into a room and talking about ourselves,” Boloña said. “We like to talk about the things we want to do, but when we were doing that, we forgot to tell our story.” Boloña’s story, of course, includes the memories and experiences of being a Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Jewish undocumented child growing up in South Florida. But Boloña defines his influence differently from the Caudillos of the movement. The way he views it, he said, everyone helps in a different way. “I’m privileged in the sense that I moved here at an early age and I don’t have an accent, I look white, I’m a man. People think I was born here,” Boloña said. “You throw out the word ‘immigrants’ and in someone’s mind an image comes to their head. I obviously don’t fit that image, so when
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He really just cares for people who haven’t been cared for. I know he’s doing a great job as student body president.
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Karen is one of the brave people that puts a lot of energy into the front lines, into the public comment, into the demonstrations.
people start to see, OK, it can be anyone, there’s literally no blanket as to what an undocumented person looks like. “Karen is one of the brave people that puts a lot of energy into the front lines, into the public comment, into the demonstrations,” said Boloña of Caudillo. And while it was Boloña and Shalhoub who eventually won the election, Caudillo has still been making change locally and nationally. Currently she is working with NextGen Rising to register over 3,000 students to vote at UCF and introduce an early voting station on campus. Caudillo has also been working with the Orlando Trust Coalition to successfully pass a declaration that states within Orlando city limits, no person is to be discriminated against because of their citizenship status. “I’ve experienced so much, and I’ve gone through so much pain,” Caudillo said. “I know that if our generation goes out and votes, they’re not going to vote against me.” As for Boloña, during his time as SGA president he has been working to provide immigration services as a part of UCF Legal Services, providing in-state tuition waivers as well as working with the Florida Student Association to
be able to provide undocumented students with in-state financial aid and Bright Futures. “He really just cares for people who haven’t been cared for,” said Caudillo of Boloña. “I know he’s doing a great job as student body president.” What Caudillo and Boloña are teaching the UCF student body and the world is that no matter what votes are cast, and what policies are being implemented, our generation is nowhere near finished speaking up and making a difference.
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How UCF basketball brought Johnny and Aubrey Dawkins back together By Dominique Smith
If you walk into UCF Men’s Basketball head coach Johnny Dawkins’ office, you’ll see his old uniforms from his playing days at Duke University and the NBA. You’ll see pictures of him working with athletes such as Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. You’ll also see him breaking down film of his players’ performance in practice. UCF redshirt junior shooting guard Aubrey Dawkins is hard to miss, standing at 6 feet 6 inches tall. He is a shooting guard for the Knights and has a smooth jump shot. His basketball skill set is a little different than Johnny Dawkins, his father and the head coach. “I think he shoots it better than I did,” Johnny said. “I know he does. I might have gotten to the basket better than he does.” The father-and-son bond between Johnny and Aubrey goes far beyond their shared love of the game
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of basketball. Before transferring to UCF, Aubrey played for the University of Michigan from 2014 to 2016. When his father accepted the position as the head basketball coach at UCF, Aubrey decided to transfer to UCF to play for his father for the first time. Johnny admits that coaching Aubrey has been unique for them. “I’ve enjoyed coaching him,” he said. “Like all of my players, he’s treated the same way with regard to how we do things. If anything, he’s held to a higher standard in a lot of the areas. But that’s a good thing. It only makes you better, and I think he’s really adjusted to his father being his coach well.” Aubrey was set to play for UCF during the 2017-2018 basketball season after sitting out the previous year, per NCAA rules for players who transfer to other schools.
Aubrey, left, and Johnny Dawkins, right, laugh during practice at UCF’s CFE Arena. Photo by Marianna Wharry
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Pour into them the things you know are right.
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But before the season started, Aubrey suffered an injury that caused him to miss the entire season. Johnny, who has suffered season-ending injuries in the past, knew what Aubrey was going through. “I’d had season injuries before, so I was able to relay those messages that he’d be fine, keep working and stay positive,” he said. “But I knew mentally that it would be difficult.” As devastating as his injury was, Aubrey admits that his injury brought him and his father closer together. “It made our relationship better,” he said. “Obviously he’s a guy who’s been through all the ups and downs of basketball. He’s seen the highs of success and the injuries, which is probably the low point of any athlete…. It was a good thing to have him around for.” One of the pieces of advice that Johnny gave Aubrey was to pour into his team while he was injured. “I told him to really throw yourself into the team and continue to throw yourself into our players,” he said. “Pour into them the things you know are right.”
While being a college athlete and a college coach are time consuming, their relationship doesn’t just revolve around basketball, which has changed now that they are together. “Basketball doesn’t usually leave the gym,” Aubrey said. “That’s one thing that’s gotten better with him now. We do so much basketball during the day that now when I’m off the court, it’s about doing fun stuff.” Off the court, some of the fun things that they like to do include going to the movies or playing putt-putt golf. “We go out and talk a little junk out there,” Johnny said. Johnny, however, is not the trash talker when they play putt-putt. “He [Aubrey] is,” he said. On the other hand, Aubrey says that he’s the better putt-putt golfer. “Well, he doesn’t have any wins in putt-putt, not yet at least,” he said. “I do have a win under my belt, so I’ll say it’s me.” The UCF Basketball team has never won a national championship. While the accomplishment would be remarkable in itself, Coach Dawkins says that winning a national championship with his team and with Aubrey would be a dream come true. “To have a shared experience like that with your team and with your son, I don’t think too many things get too much better than that.” Aubrey appreciates the man that his father is and his legacy on the court and off the court. He says that his father’s life is what he wants his to look like. “If I can live my life in any way similar and close to his, then I’ve done all right.”
Above: Johnny Dawkins smiles during an interview in his office at UCF’s CFE Arena. Right: Aubrey Dawkins dribbles a basketball while practicing with his teammates. Left: Aubrey, left, and Johnny Dawkins, right, stand in the CFE Arena during a practice. Photos by Marianna Wharry
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If I can live my life in any way similar to his, then I’ve done all right.
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Life After Parkland
Generation Parkland goes to college and redefines itself in the process By Paola Peralta
His new beginning started with a high school diploma, a three-hour road trip north and a baseball cap. As far as school spirited apparel goes, the $22 black and gold UCF baseball cap is pretty standard for the average Knight, but for Moises Lobaton, 18, it held a much deeper significance–it marked the commencement of a journey toward a career, a future and a family. Suddenly he was part of something bigger than before. Suddenly he was more than just a “Parkland Kid.” “That hat was definitely the first step for me,” Lobaton said proudly. “I always wear it.” Lobaton joined 57,000 other UCF students this fall as they returned from a long summer, and in his case, an even longer year. Just seven months ago on Feb. 14, 2018, Lobaton was sitting in his AP psychology class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when the glass panel of his classroom door shattered in what he and his classmates initially believed was just a drill. The shooting claimed the lives of 14 of his classmates, and three of his teachers. Now, halfway through his first semester of college, the UCF freshman hospitality major is slowly but surely transitioning into what he called a “somewhat normal routine” in Orlando. “The first few weeks were very difficult,” he recalled. “But as time goes by, you realize that you’re not alone.” Although things are much better, Lobaton said that leaving home is still the hardest thing he had to do. In the
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aftermath of the shooting, he’d grown closer to all of his friends, his family and his community. Despite how much it hurt, he knew that it had only made him stronger. Wanting to pursue a degree in hospitality, he said choosing UCF was easy. It was breaking it to his friends that wasn’t. Lobaton knew he had to put aside the past and prioritize his education. “College is kind of a fresh start,” he said. “That’s what I wanted.” Also searching for her fresh start was a fellow freshman and Stoneman Douglas alumna, Erica Sparrow, 18. Sparrow didn’t wait until the fall to start school–she was packed up and moved into her dorm for the summer term. “I wanted to just get out of there and start new,” the nursing major said. “It’s about here and what’s going on here.” Sparrow applied to four state schools, including UCF. After touring several campuses and balancing her options, she had a choice to make. In the end, Sparrow chose the campus that spoke to her the most. “It felt like home to me,” she said. “This is the school I wanted to go to.” Unlike Lobaton, who experienced the tragedy from inside the infamous building 12, Sparrow was evacuated from the other side of the school and out of harm’s way. What the two share, however, is the dedication to move past their trauma and on with their lives. “It was my high school and it’s something tragic that I’ll
Moises Lobaton and Erica Sparrow sit outside of the UCF Reflecting Pond in Marjory Stoneman Douglas attire. Photo by Rachel White
never forget,” Sparrow said. “But right now I’m worried about school, my classes, graduating, getting a job and going on in my life.” Sparrow said that today, her biggest concern is passing all of her classes and maintaining a 4.0 GPA. She plans on applying to UCF’s nursing program once she’s finished all of her general education courses. For Lobaton, the key to moving forward has been to keep himself busy by immersing himself in campus life. He’s currently a member of the Burnett Honors College, plays for UCF’s e-sport subdivision Counter Strike team and volunteers at the Arboretum. He said that once he makes the move over to the Rosen campus, he hopes to get involved with the hospitality management clubs offered there. Although many of his close friends didn’t come to Orlando with him, Lobaton said UCF has provided him with a sense of normalcy and community. He’s even managed to make a few close friends through Counter Strike. He said staying busy keeps him distracted. “I don’t try and forget about it, but I try not to think about it,” he said. The impact of the shooting was felt throughout the nation. Suddenly, Lobaton and Sparrow’s tiny hometown was the birthplace of an entire movement. For months their school was made every headline on every channel. Sparrow was interviewed leaving funeral services, and Lobaton said he turned down interview after interview, to the point where he stopped answering altogether. “Coming back from something like that is a tremendous amount of effort,” he said. “When they keep asking questions, the thoughts keep coming back up.”
Despite the worldwide media coverage, Lobaton said college has granted him the chance to meet new people who didn’t have to know how close the massacre hit home unless he wanted them to. “If it happens it happens, but I try to stray away from that and just make new friends,” Lobaton said. Although Lobaton said he believes what his classmates are doing nationally is amazing, he prefers to keep to himself. Lobaton’s activism will come in the form of walking quietly to the polls and voting for the first time this fall. If the occasion arises where he’s asked where he’s from, Lobaton said he’s developed a method around the sometimes uncomfortable conversation. “When I tell people, I just say South Florida. If they ask where, I say Broward County. If they know Broward County, then I’ll tell them my school,” he said. “Broward County and South Florida are the safest places to say, and if they don’t ask beyond that, it’s better for me.” In Washington D.C., Robert Schentrup, 19, is trying to build a positive legacy from the rubble of the tragedy. The UCF sophomore lost his younger sister, Carmen Schentrup, 16, on Valentine’s Day. After taking the necessary time to process and recover, he began getting involved with causes such as the Brady Campaign and its youth initiative against gun violence, Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy’s political campaign helping with voter registration, and the March For Our Lives: Road to Change tour over the summer. Schentrup said he’s found that although no amount of talking about it will ever normalize what happened, it can lessen the weight on his shoulders.
Above: Robert Schentrup registers voters at the Keep Families Together rally. Photo Courtesy of Robert Schentrup/Facebook Left: Lobaton and Sparrow proudly wearing Douglas Eagles shirts. Photo by Rachel White
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define me, “ It’ll but I will also define myself.
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“The way I see it, trauma like this will always find a way to come out,” he said. “If you let yourself have these moments, you’re able to cope with it and deal with it instead of it just bursting out.” As of now, Schentrup said he doesn’t see a future for himself in politics. The psychology major said he wants to get his degree and go into counseling in hopes of giving others the same life-shaping therapy he received both before and after the shooting. Right now, he’s just taking full advantage of opportunities as they come. One of those opportunities came in the form of a semester-long fellowship in the nation’s capital with Rise, a political campaign dedicated to helping pass legislation at a state level in order to codify basic civil rights for millions of survivors of sexual assault and violence across the U.S. Like Lobaton and Sparrow, he said he will bring up his alma mater when he sees fit. Schentrup sees the shooting as part of his identity, but not as one of the main identifiers of who he is. He said he sympathizes with the freshmen and their struggle to reclaim who they are. “Their identity is tied to the Parkland shooting. They’re one of the ‘Parkland Kids,’” he said. “They don’t want to talk about it because they want their identity to be them as a person.” Out of 6,368 UCF freshmen, only 20 are from Stoneman Douglas. Though they are few, their voices will not go unheard. “It’ll define me, but I will also define myself,” Lobaton said. “They’re not going to label me as the ‘Stoneman Douglas Kid.’ I know who I am and what I’ve been through.” Lobaton said he wants to be known for the impact he
makes through what he can offer in his major. He said one day he hopes to help out the freshman students taking his place. “If I could act as a mentor or an adviser to someone, that would be great,” he said. “Show these kids that you can definitely make an impact.” For Lobaton and Sparrow, UCF is a sanctuary, a new beginning and a gateway to their future. But it will never be their first home. “Parkland will always be my home,” Lobaton said. “I will always miss Parkland.” Sparrow wears her Douglas shirt around campus with pride. With everything they’ve accomplished, she said she’s proud to have graduated from there. Who knows what the future holds for Sparrow and Lobaton? For now, Sparrow said she wants to be a neonatal nurse–a career she’s wanted since she was a little girl. Meanwhile, Lobaton is torn between being a general hotel manager or working in the marketing department at Disney. As for Lobaton’s hat, it’s currently in its second reincarnation, since the original was lost in a trampoline park. However, the sentimentality and message remain the same. “I can’t rewrite the story,” he said. “But I can start a new chapter.”
Robert Schentrup on the March for Our Lives: The Road to Change tour on July 26. Photo courtesy of Emilee Rose McGovern
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A Hope Restored How two servicemen rediscovered themselves following trauma By Brenda Argueta Eight years ago, Daniel Griffis helped try to bring a blonde-haired baby girl back to life, but despite CPR efforts made by him, fellow firefighters and other first responders, she lost her life. Now 30 years old, the smells of the accident and the sounds of the running firetrucks still haunt Daniel Griffis, who, at the time, was a volunteer firefighter. He now works in Central Florida as a firefighter. “It was pretty detailed things I could remember because to me it was still like it happened yesterday,” Daniel Griffis said.
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While Daniel dealt with the inconsistencies as a volunteer firefighter and the new experience, his wife Brianne Griffis, 32, became his confidant. “You, as a wife, carry a lot of that burden of just knowing all the gruesome details of a child’s death or a burning person screaming for help that [he] couldn’t get to,” Brianne Griffis said. That call was just the start of his journey, one of self-discovery, but it was not without trials and tribulations. Up until recently, he used to jolt awake at least five times a night before realizing he was at home and not at the fire station. “I was just being on edge. It’s about the transition from being on-call and being ready at any given moment, to now coming home and switching into dad and husband-mode,” he said. A culmination of traumatizing calls, smells and physical responses over the last eight years led to his diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. “We deal with life and death. As a firefighter, you show up and you’re asked to fix everything,” he said. “You’re literally the catch-all on every call we show up.” His wife said she noticed him becoming a man who lacked empathy and would constantly be on edge. She was desperate to help their family life and find a way to help him. “I was being affected, the kids were struggling. I started to think, ‘There has to be an answer to this. We can’t be a statistic,’” Brianne Griffis said. Brianne spent three months convincing her husband to try out UCF Restores’ PTSD clinic for at least two sessions. Each time he was startled awake throughout the night or was hypervigilant, she would point out how he needed the program. When he finally started the program, their concerns shifted to the reactions of the community around them. “I watched a lot of fire families expose themselves to going through a program and they were no longer invited places, just really outcasted,” Brianne Griffis said. She had heard about the UCF Restores’ PTSD clinic, recently renamed Rosengren Trauma Clinic at UCF Restores, from other fire wives. The wives told Brianne about their husbands going through the program and the impact it has made on their lives. The clinic was renamed after Jim Rosengren, a UCF alumnus, who completed a $1 million donation in September. Rosengren pledged the amount because of the clinic’s positive effects on his son, a military veteran, who served two tours in Iraq and returned with severe PTSD. “It’s been a long time coming. His son was here probably four years ago and the money’s finally following suit,” said Dr. Sandra Neer, research assistant professor at UCF Restores. Military veteran Stephen Cotta, 29, worked as a combat engineer and returned from his last tour in 2009. By the time he accepted he needed treatment, it had been five years since his last tour and he was going through a divorce.
“I really reached rock bottom in my life. I wasn’t in a very good place mentally and it was a very dark place in my life,” Cotta said. “ I needed to do something.” Part of the exposure therapy for military veterans is returning to a particularly stressful situation and helping retrain their physiological reaction. Quinton Smith, social work services specialist and clinician at UCF Restores, works the virtual reality equipment geared toward military veterans. “It may not be a perfect recreation of the scene, but the idea is to put them in that moment as closely as possible,” Smith said. Smith does this by selecting a narrative that closely matches the one a patient talks through. For military veterans, Smith has a collection of visuals in his computer like a Middle Eastern market or the inside of a military vehicle that the patient can see through a VR headset. Cotta went through the clinic’s exposure therapy twice a week. He said it’s helped him learn more about himself, understand his triggers and gain an understanding that this will stick with him forever. “Exposure therapy is so scary and so difficult, but it’s so beautiful at the same time. It shows you that you have the strength within you to be able to handle those situations,” he said. Cotta said the stigmas and social norms in the military pushed
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I started to think, ‘There has to be an answer to this. We can’t be a statistic.’
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him away from admitting he needed help sooner. “It’s frowned upon to be the person who admits to needing help,” Cotta said. “It took a long time for me to admit it, but I think I always knew.” Cotta completed the program and Daniel Griffis is now preparing to complete his treatment. He is able to sleep through the night and encourages his fellow firefighters – even the ones just starting out – to go through the program. “Seeing how it’s affected our personal life, teaching me and giving me the ability to understand and cope with stressful calls that I have, I think is just amazing.”
Left: Brianne Griffis folds her hands as she listens to her husband, Daniel, share his experiences as a firefighter battling PTSD. Right: Daniel Griffis stands in front of his station’s fire truck. The Central Florida firefighter went to the UCF Restores clinic at the urging of his wife, Brianne, despite potential backlash from the community. Photos by Rachel White
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A Fight for their Island Puerto Rican students speak out 1 year after Maria By Colton Adkins & Paola Peralta
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Puerto Rico wasn’t the same the day before.
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When 155 mph winds landed on Puerto Rico, more than 3 million Puerto Ricans took shelter in their homes and waited for the storm to pass. Now, one year after Hurricane Maria tore through the Caribbean, the clouds have dissipated and the rain has stopped, but the effects felt throughout the island of Puerto Rico are still creating hardship and impacting people’s lives. After the storm, millions of people had to live without food, water, electricity or knowing whether their loved ones were safe. This included Puerto Ricans on and off the island. When Jose Luis Rivera, a 21-year-old senior economics major, started the Puerto Rican Student Association at UCF, he simply wanted to get to know more people from Puerto Rico that had similar experiences to him. Who was he to know that in a few short weeks he would find himself at the forefront of a movement that would bring hundreds of his fellow islanders to UCF? “It defined our life. It restructured our lives. Puerto Rico wasn’t the same the day before Maria and the day after Maria,” Rivera said. “It changed everything.” The aftermath of Hurricane Maria tasked Rivera with not only building the club he’d envisioned, but finding a way to do the most good for the most people. “It was really difficult in the sense that we weren’t expecting this,” Rivera said. “The situation was so devastating that people felt like they had to do anything and all that they could to help.”
Rivera said that for him, it was about creating a short-term and long-term plan to ensure that whatever decisions were made, they would endure long after the hurricane was over. For him, this meant focusing all the club’s structuring around what could be done both on and off the island. “We didn’t want to just collect items and just throw them and see where they go,” he said. “We thought about ourselves here and how we could target students and families and create a larger community sense.” Rivera now has since stepped down in leadership from PRSA to help Mayor Buddy Dyer on his team. Although it was not an easy decision, Rivera said he knew it was necessary for the continuity of the club to have more students from the island on the executive board. However, Rivera does remain active within the club. Today, over half the executive board are evacuated students. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans fled to Florida to start their new lives. Of those 100,000, more than 200 enrolled at UCF and received help from the PRSA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reported that one year later, 99.99 percent of Puerto Rico has power back. These statistics, however, do not tell the stories of families like Jennifer Tirado’s, whose power will go out every two days if it rains just a little bit. Tirado, a 21-year-old industrial engineering major and current PRSA President, spent a month in Puerto Rico over the summer and had to spend time without power on days when the weather didn’t cooperate. Some Puerto Ricans, Tirado said, came to Orlando after Maria because it was impossible to return to the island. “A lot of people are here in Orlando because they don’t have a home,” Tirado said. “They can’t go back to Puerto Rico because they don’t have work or anywhere to go.” This was the reality for UCF seniors Paola Monzon, 22, and Elaine Rosa, 22. “It was really overwhelming,” Rosa said. “Not only the school part and the academic part but emotionally.” Both are from the island’s capital, San
Information provided by George Washington University & UCF’s Puerto Rican Student Association.
Juan, where much of their families still reside. Monzon said that although her home in Puerto Rico is still standing, because of the flooding and the damage it will never be the same. “The weeks and months after were too much,” Monzon said. “I don’t like thinking about it.” Although it’s been a year, the storm is fresh in their minds. Monzon said that even here, far from the island, too much rain or too much wind makes her nervous and that even though things might look better, they’re not. The lifestyle on the island has completely shifted. Monzon said she recalled a day where the electricity went out for two days and her family made it through using a gas stove, flashlights, solar panels and water reserves.
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We’re in survival mode.
“Those are things we now use,” Monzon said. “We’re in survival mode.” Both Rivera and Tirado helped these students come to UCF while serving for PRSA. The biggest role the pair played in helping Puerto Rican students was extending the in-state tuition waivers, which were initially set to end in the spring of 2019, until spring 2023. Rivera and Tirado did not work alone. From the Multicultural Academic and Support Services office, Dr. Cyndia Muñiz and from the Office of Financial Aid, Ric Colon worked closely with Rivera to uncover how they could make the tuition waivers a reality. To this day Rivera continues to meet with Colon regularly and said he considers him a mentor. The skies may be clear and the sea may be calm, but Hurricane Maria still brews in the lives of many Puerto Rican men and women, whether they’re rebuilding their homes on the island or rebuilding their lives at UCF.
$ 90 billion in
1 in 4
people’s daily lives still disrupted 1 year later
damages
more than
200
Puerto Rican students impacted by Maria at UCF
2,975
estimated deaths
Jose Luis Rivera and his mother stand in front of a collapsed bridge after Hurricane Maria. Photos courtesy of Jose Luis Rivera
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Homeward Bound By Ryan Weiss Carlisha Murray sat in her adviser’s office in the Nicholson School of Communication during the summer of 2018, one semester away from graduation and just about ready to quit. “I was ready to throw it all away last semester,” Murray said. “I was like, ‘I’m done. I can’t do it. I’m not smart enough to do it.’” Then Murray realized, from where she started back in high school to where she was now at UCF, she had made it too far and proved too many people wrong to quit that close to the finish line. Murray, a senior human communications major from Jacksonville, Florida, grew up in the foster care system. Murray entered foster care at 13 years old and remained in foster care until she aged out at 18. In that time, Murray lived with three different foster families for a year and a half, two years, and two and a half years respectively. The last family she stayed with consisted of her biological aunt and uncle who she had no prior contact with. Murray’s school is not being paid for by her foster family, but by the state of Florida with a waiver from the Department of Children and Families (DCF). The DCF waiver is given to students who were in foster care until the age of 18, were adopted from the DCF after May 5, 1997, were in the custody of a relative or non-relative when they were 18 years old or if they were placed in guardianship after the age of 16 by a court after spending at least six months in the care of the DCF. The DCF waiver covers all tuition and fees for the student until they reach the age of 28. Students themselves must find a way to pay for things such as housing,
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food, transportation and other everyday life expenses. Murray pays her costs by working at Florida Hospital and through grants she recieves through UCF. Murray never thought she would have to worry about paying for college though, because she didn’t think she was going to college. When Murray was in high school, she said she wasn’t interested in college. She wasn’t even sure if she’d finish high school. “A lot of people told me I wouldn’t,” Murray said. “I was pretty bad, I missed a lot of high school. So by the grace of God, I am here.” Murray attributes missing so much high school due to being moved around so much and being separated from her five siblings on her birth mother’s side, none of which finished high school. When Murray did start college however, she did so without a DCF waiver, because she didn’t know it existed. Murray started her college career at Tallahassee Community College and it wasn’t until her second semester in school that she found out she could have her tuition covered when her foster mother did research and discovered she was eligible. Her time at Tallahassee Community College was the most difficult for Murray. She said she was lonely and suffered from depression and she left within the first semester. She then transferred to Florida State College in Jacksonville, where she received her A.A. degree. Murray was influenced by her foster mother to get her bachelor’s degree, and her friend who attended UCF persuaded her to go the school. When Murray got to UCF, that overwhelming feeling came back; one of those overwhelming moments was about her DCF waiver. “When I would go to the financial aid office, I would be embarrassed to say I have a tuition waiver,” Murray said. However, once Murray found people
she could connect with, she felt like she fit right in at UCF. After her first semester, Murray discovered Multicultural Academic and Support Services (MASS) and found out there were other foster students at UCF. During her third semester, Murray found the AOK Scholars program which serves students who were in foster care as well. “When Carlisha moved from Jacksonville, she took a chance on herself and left there and came here,” MASS Assistant Director Tammie Nadeau said. “By herself, without any family, without any support and started here as a student, because she thought this was the foundation that she could grow. And once she became one of our students we’ve just helped her become the bigger person than she already was.”
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I missed a lot of high school. So by the grace of God, I am here.
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Student finds a home at UCF after living in foster care as a teenager
While Murray is the sole decision maker from important decisions like transferring from Tallahassee Community College to smaller things like her braces, she does have some people who have helped her throughout her time at UCF. Caila Coleman is a mentor she was introduced to through her Nicholson adviser. Nadeau has also been an influential force to Murray at UCF. “[Carlisha] is one of the [students] I’ve really grown attached to,” Nadeau said. “I have a relationship with all of [the students], but she’s one of the ones I’ve really grown attached to. Only because
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