[MUSIC PLAYING]
ANA PATRICIA ESQUEDA: Nobody in my family,
or at least the generation before me, has gone to college.
So even within my generation, I'm the first one.
The hardest part of being first-generation
is that you, at least at home, don't
have anyone who's guiding you.
So my mom didn't know what a personal statement was, or she
didn't know how to apply to financial aid.
She didn't even realize that we had
to have records of our taxes to submit every year.
So it's the little things where you take them for granted
before you're applying to college.
But then when you're applying, and it's so hard
to even explain to your family.
And then with me, there was the language barrier.
NIMISHA BARTON: Ana Patricia began
with the Princeton University Preparatory Program, also known
as PUPP,
a selective college prep program that
helps first-gen, low-income students in the area
get into highly selective college programs.
And then of course, FSI, Freshman Scholars Institute,
which is a summer academic bridge program.
And then finally, the Scholars Institute Fellows Program
kind of allows us to continue to provide mentorship
to these students, to remain in close touch with them,
primarily through the workshops.
Some of the roundtables, some of the panels that we offer,
that's meant to kind of help them navigate what it's
like to be a student at Princeton in terms
of the academic skills you have to have,
and in terms of, just sort of like, mental health and life
skills kind of support.
ANA PATRICIA ESQUEDA: SIFP has also helped
in terms of building or maintaining
that community of low-income or first-generation students
who are kind of going through the same thing at once,
and who can help one another in terms of how to pick a major,
how to balance your workload, how
to find internships -- things that,
to someone who is coming as a first-generation college
student, you kind of need that guidance.
NIMISHA BARTON: It's extremely important for Princeton
to continue its policies around college access,
and also to continue in the vein that it already has begun --
creating these programs, these continuing
support programs for students.
These four-year programs, I think, ultimately
render visible all things that all students need to succeed.
ANA PATRICIA ESQUEDA: I don't know exactly how I got interested
in psychology.
But I know what I want to do -- criminal psychology, which
would be working with inmates.
Our criminal justice system doesn't really
do justice to the inmates that are in the prison system.
And then back to my upbringing, the criminal justice system
of Venezuela is even more messed up in its ways.
So I think having a way to impact
the lives of those inmates, and having a way of finding out
why they're doing the crimes that they're committing,
and how we can stop that before it even gets to that point.
NIMISHA BARTON: I hope that Ana Patricia finds
independent projects with faculty advisers and mentors
here that are really meaningful and exciting to her.
She just has so much to offer, and so much potential.