The NTSA - Marketing Director 2023-2024

I’m a native Californian, born in Orange and raised in Chino Hills.  I grew up in a poorer neighborhood where dropping out was a far more common occurrence than graduating high school and my later school friends were expressly forbidden from going.  With my own parents’ drug habits, I’m not sure I entirely blame them.  Fortunately, I was placed in the local Gifted and Talented Education program which gave me a much better foundational education and as well as caring teachers and driven peers even as it gave me a much longer commute to school.  I made the most of those long bus rides by using the time to do last-minute homework that I put off.

I excelled in school, even if my homework habits hadn’t improved.  In high school, I was named to my school’s Academic Decathlon team which competed with other schools in the Inland Empire across several disciplines.  In my senior year, I placed second in the History category, only missing a question regarding Indira Gandhi, as well as leading my team to victory in team trivia after a marathon sudden-death showdown with the eventual second-place team.

However, even as my classmates applied and were accepted to higher education, my own family’s financial situation and general lack of support meant that I wasn’t going to follow the same path.  With my family relocating to the Central Coast, I attended the local community college while attempting to balance work in retail management.  While the eventual goal was to transfer to a full university, work took over and I school plans were abandoned.

Work took me to Farmington, New Mexico, a place of wonderfully clean air and…. Look, give me some time and I’ll eventually come up with another good point for it.  After that work returned me to California, this time in the Coachella Valley and the blistering summers there.  Despite the heat, it was infinitely better than New Mexico, and I enjoyed several years there.  However, corporate financial difficulties saw my job disappear.  I returned to the Central Coast where my family had been targeted by a legal scam.  Standing up to the perpetrators, as part of a much larger team, they were rebuked, and the perpetrators sentenced to a federal penitentiary.

With the Covid pandemic, I had returned to my local community college, only hoping to complete a business certificate course to improve my employability.  When I had heard on the news that the UC and Cal State systems were delaying their application deadlines by a week however, I decided to see if I might be able to make it.  After determining that I could just barely make the requirements, I rushed to complete my applications and only submitted my UC application ten minutes before the deadline.  

I had only wanted to see if I could get accepted, I honestly did not expect to be able to attend due to the cost.  It was what had prevented me from attending before when I first graduated from high school, and I thought that would still be the case.  When my acceptance came from Cal Poly Pomona, the amount of loans needed was staggering for them.  So, when I was accepted to UCSD I was floored at how much more generous the financial aid package was.  It was truly a life-changing event, and one that I am still humbled by.

While my time here has been challenging at a personal level, I have managed to continue to thrive academically.  My second year saw me participate in study abroad, where I studied for a year at Sciences Po in France.  My time there was truly extraordinary, and I had the opportunity to engage in phenomenal challenges, personal growth, and meet wonderful people.  I was lucky enough to be able to travel the world over the summer as I returned to San Diego to finish my studies.  In this final year, I was fortunate to be able to join the NTSA, where I was able to find a sense of community that I had been denied until then at UCSD.   While my future plans are still unknown, I do hope to return to Europe to pursue an advanced degree.

No matter what though, the friends I’ve found with the NTSA will always be with me.

~Ben