Inspiring talented, high performing students from diverse backgrounds to dream big, I support students like you to find the best in themselves while helping them to develop the path from where they are now to where they can be as transfer students. If you are interested in joining the Honors Program, then chances are you have a desire to learn and therefore possess a singular tendency to embrace challenges (and encouragement from others), along with a determined willingness to ask big questions, to fuel your curiosity.

Prior to De Anza, I was a first-generation college student myself, hungry to understand who I was, where I stood in the struggle, and where I could go in life, yet painfully unaware of the opportunities in college, let alone my own gifts or the cultural strengths I inherited from my immigrant parents. Later in life, after graduating from Cal and St. Mary's, I found the most powerful calling and became an educator.

I wanted nothing more than to meet you, to know you -- and your gorgeous dreams.

During my first 10 years at De Anza, I've been committed to supporting students like you; initially, as a counselor for a federally funded program designed for high potential students, which in turn led to my current faculty role as the Counselor for Biological, Health, & Environmental Sciences Division where I get to meet amazing students everyday interested in studying science to heal those in need i.e., everyone.

As the new Honors Program Coordinator, my goal is to help you get connected to a larger community of like-minded students; to introduce you to new resources and opportunities for learning and success; and to support your transfer goals. I will be many things to many students, but to describe what my role will not be in this community, I can only refer to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who once said:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Do not seek the answers now, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

I won't offer final answers to anything transfer or career-related; I can only serve as a starting point to those wiling to live their questions. My name is Tom. What's yours?