Guadalupe Martinez

Student

“SMC let me discover my own direction at my own pace.”

The big move from Jalisco, Mexico—when it came for her family—was good news/bad news for “Lupe” Martinez. “It was exciting and intimidating,” she remembers. “I was happy to be going into something new, but I came from a very small town and I was frightened. I didn’t speak any English and I got very depressed. I didn’t think I would ever learn English, or anything else! But poco a poco…”

Lupe continued the struggle with a new language and excelled and found her way to SMC. “I was a little lost, my first semester,” she recalls. “But I started going to the counseling offices and I got a guideline for what I should be doing. And Mr. Stiles was the greatest,” says Lupe. “He helped me find the classes I needed and he saved me so much time by pointing out which classes would have been useless to me.”

Lupe has transferred to Northridge and is continuing to study for a career as a CPA. “It’s a pretty full schedule at school and I have to balance it with my job at the bank,” she reports. “And then,” she adds with a laugh, “there’s all that time I have to spend on the freeway.”

Lupe says that many teachers at SMC have made a lasting impression on her. “I studied history with Harvey Stromberg and political science with Alan Buckley,” she says. “But there are so many good teachers here that I can’t even remember them all.”

Lupe hopes that Mexico and the U.S. will move closer in mutual respect for each other in the future. “And I hope Mexico will somehow be guided to be a place where the people will become much more involved in the direction of their country.”

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