Voces Video: Carolina Peña

Profile

Carolina is a native of Ecuador. She immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 10 with her mother and younger brother, and attended a private high school in Maryland on a need-based scholarship, graduating with a 4.0 GPA. She is 21, single, bilingual, a U.S. citizen, and lives with her family. Carolina is enrolled full-time at a community college, commutes to school, and works part-time. Her mother has some college education (although not a degree) and their family income is between $40,000 and $60,000 a year.

Carolina is a sophomore at Montgomery College (Community College) and is in the highly-selective Montgomery Scholars Program. Through this program she receives financial aid and is exposed to such opportunities as studying International Relations for a summer at Cambridge University in England. She plans to continue her education and pursue a degree in Communications by transferring to a university.

Carolina is a 2005 Hispanic Heritage Foundation Youth Award Gold medallion recipient in Journalism. Since 2003, she has been the host of Generación Latina, a cable television show for Latino youth in Montgomery County, and writes articles for the youth section of Revista Buena Gente, a local magazine.

College choices
For Carolina, the primary factors in her college choice were the institution’s size, cost, and location. Location was probably the most critical factor because her family is very close knit. Her family, especially her mother, really wanted her to go to a college close to home. Since Carolina liked the schools in her surrounding area, she did not consider her family’s insistence to be a hardship in her college choice. She has heard people criticize making college choices based on location, but wonders if the “cultural value” placed on family is in conflict with this broader expectation of college choice.

College information
Carolina got most of her information about college from Internet research on sites like the College Board, and sites geared to Latinos, such as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) website. There were only 25 Hispanic students at her private school. She did not think her high school provided useful resources about colleges and her counselor had no information about Latino organizations and resources that could have helped her initially in making her college choice. She found out about most of the resources she used on her own.

Paying for college
Since she was 10, Carolina’s mom told her that her number one goal was to get a college education. While her mother supported that goal, she also told Carolina that it was up to her as a student to figure out how to pay for her education. Carolina is an only child and lives with her mother, so she helps to offset college and living expenses by working.

Carolina saw the following options to pay for college: take on a $10,000 debt each year to go to a university or go to the local community college as part of an honors program. She chose to go to the community college because it offered her lots of opportunities of financial aid as well as exposure to a strong academic program and activities with a cohort of students. She now plans to transfer to American University (a private institution in Washington DC). While the university has not offered as much financial aid as when she was at the community college, she still thinks the costs are worth it. She was happy at the community college because she saved “tons of money” that she could then spend to attend the institution she transferred to. During her time at the community college, she did not have any loans (only scholarships and grants). She expects to take out a loan for her junior year at the university and hopes that it will be through the school and not a private loan because she knows that interest rates are “crazy” high.