About Me Statement

About me Statement

My name is Leilani Gonzales, I’m a freshman at the University of California Santa Cruz, and this is my journey to psychology.

I started my high school career at James Lick High School, which I attended for one semester. During this time my career aspirations were becoming a lawyer. I thought it was the best way of helping my community by solving cases.

I moved to Mission Oak High School Which I attended for the next year. At this point in my life I struggled to see a clear path as a lawyer. I did not think law was fit for me and it felt as if it would not satisfy my urge to make an impact within my community.

I started to question what I really wanted to pursue and until I moved to Milpitas High School I explored different fields. I took many different classes, such as forensics, sociology, art history, and psychology. This was my first interaction with psychology as a learning subject, I did not know exactly what psychology was or meant but had the opportunity to further explore the subject's meaning through an internship with De Anza College.

The California Youth Leadership Corps sparked my passion for community work. Some of the things I learned community organizing skills through workshops and empathy groups. The empathy groups in particular were my favorite part of this internship as it taught me the language of empathy within my peers. We practiced, learned, and applied these skills in real life in community organizations, in my case Assemblymember Alex Lee’s office. This internship was not simply community organizing skills, it expanded to empathy and a sort of support group helping us grow as individuals.

This internship was specifically established for those that are looking to pursue a career in community work. I personally did not see myself in this path but the more work I did with this program the more involved and engaged I felt with my community. This helped me discover my passion for psychology and now I am an intended psychology major.

Along discovering this passion I found a lot of new interests such as cognitive science. Like psychology I did not know exactly what cognitive science was or if it was something I could pursue. But when I got to the University of California Santa Cruz I decided to take a cognitive science course where I learned about the subject and got to understand the type of work one can do. Now I plan to double major in psychology and cognitive science. Both subjects go hand in hand with my want to help the people around me in different ways.

This is my journey to psychology, I look forward to learning more about this class because despite it not being directly correlated with my career paths there are ties within health connecting both.

My Pathway