Summary of Ruby Baker's Interview

A thing that I had found interesting from my interview with my mentor was how I could relate to her experience. She talked about how her parents kept pushing her to be a doctor. That’s something that I can personally relate to as well. Ever since I was a young kid, my parents had always wanted me to become a doctor and sort of pressured me into becoming one. “Basically, initially, I was actually a biology major, wanted to go pre-med. I wanted to actually be a veterinarian, but my parents kind of pushed me into being a doctor. They kept saying that all the time when I’d say vet. So, I was at UCSD and I felt that it wasn’t a good match for me. And so I was like, well, I guess I don’t really want to be a bio major at the point.” I’m really grateful for all of the insight she provided me about her high school career as well as her college career. She told me her experience at UCSD and I’m glad that she told me because UCSD is the school that I would like to go to. She said that her experience there was most likely different that what someone attending UCSD would experience now. “State it’s an amazing place, they were just totally different and at UCSD, it was like, oh you’re a minority and you know, you’re kind of destined to fail, I kind of got that attitude there. So then, I just was in the wrong environment and it just didn’t work that way. And then, everybody is like, more like, it’s like budget school for the rich basically, so it just wasn’t quite a good fit for me. Now it’s different, I would not say that now about it because there’s a lot more minorities that are there and it’s so different, but when I was going there, definitely pioneer and trailblazers because there was not a lot of color.” I think a common theme that kept popping up during our interview was my mentor explaining her experience at UCSD. “I feel like I wasted the year at UCSD instead of not being able to just like enjoy being a human being.” "Okay, well, I was at UCSD and then again, my parents were the ones that really pushed me to do that. So that’s why when I was there, I felt like it wasn’t a good fit. And it’s also to, like, you want to balance because some of the people there were not, how do I say this, well being a minority, and being like a hispanic where there was very few hispanics, even when I was there, people didn’t think I was mexican, they would think that I was persian.”