From Mexico to Yale

Crystal Brown

cbrown@weatherforddemocrat.com

Weatherford High School senior Mariana Lopez-Rosas is still recovering from shock over the recent news of her acceptance to Yale University.

Four years ago, she was living in Mexico as her mother and father struggled to keep work after moving the family from one small town to the other.

“Those were a happy 14 years,” she said sarcastically about growing up in Mexico. “In Mexico, we moved a lot because my dad had changed jobs and we didn’t have a permanent house, so it was easy to move.”

Lopez-Rosas’ uncle lives in Alabama and started the application process for the family to obtain visas for her father, Tomas, more than a decade ago.

“It didn’t come in until 15 years later, and he had a family,” she said. “But, he decided to take the chance.”

So, the family packed up all they could in a few suitcases and headed for Alabama. After a few months, Tomas found work with an oil company based in Weatherford and the family moved to Texas.

It was Lopez-Rosas’ spring semester of her freshman year and she found herself shocked to be in high school. She said high school in Mexico doesn’t begin until 10th grade, so she felt she had some catching up to do with her peers.

“There were all these awesome people around me who were going to college with scholarships and had a tremendous list of activities they did and were really smart,” she said. “I thought I might be at a disadvantage.”

First, she learned English. One of her first days in class she remembers a teacher asking what her name was and all she could do was smile and nod.

“I knew I must learn English,” Lopez-Rosas said. “My parents didn’t go to college, but they always taught me that to succeed or at least to break the circle of poverty, you have to attend college. For me, coming here was a huge challenge. It wasn’t only learning English, but managing good grades, good enough to get into college and get scholarships. That was going to be the only way I would have to pay for it.”

She and her mother, Maria, spent many afternoons at the Weatherford Public Library where Lopez-Rosas honed her English skills by reading everything she could. She also made flashcards and set a daily goal of vocabulary she would learn.

“I was really pretty geeky with them,” she said.

And to make her scholarship and college applications pop, she started searching for extracurricular activities to participate in. She doesn’t play sports, but she did find her niche on the high school paper, The Grass Bur, where she is now the editor. She also participates in the academic decathlon and competes in the UIL literary criticism, headline writing and editorial writing competitions. She is a volunteer at the Weatherford Public Library, a member of the National Honor Society, in the writers club and is a junior ambassador. She was named a National Hispanic Scholar finalist earlier this semester.

Last summer, she attended journalism camp in Dallas and one of her pieces she wrote on her immigration caught the eye of a University of Nebraska professor. The professor started recruiting her to his school and that made her realize she had some college possibilities.

“After that, I got the writing bug,” she said.

She began writing about her family and meeting Mexican President Vicente Fox as part of an academic trip. WHS English teacher Staci Tharp became a mentor to Lopez-Rosas and helped edit her college entrance essays and encouraged her to keep writing.

“Mariana is one of the most talented writers that I’ve ever taught,” Tharp said. “Her abilities as an English student are exceptional, especially so because of her limited exposure to our language. She has amazingly explored that potential to its greatest. She is so intelligent and so special in that, and so very proud of her and her accomplishments.”

Tharp told Lopez-Rosas about the QuestBridge program that offers full scholarships to select schools for students with academic achievements, but are economically disadvantaged. With the assistance of WHS counselor Rubette Fowler, she sent in her application, but was only expecting to receive some fee waivers.

“Filling out the recommendations and the forms for her was a lot fun because she’s so bright and does everything so well,” Fowler said. “She’s one of the few top students up there that I’ve known. She works so hard and is bright, but she is so humble and appreciative of any small kindness. She is more special than I can begin to explain. She is unusually mature and a motivated student. She will go far and be successful no matter what she does.”

On the day she was expecting to find out her results, she was headed to the library thinking about calculus homework. She went to the library to check her e-mail and saw one from the QuestBridge program. She opened it and started reading an acceptance letter to Yale.

Shock and suspicion filled her, but she went outside to call her dad and began celebrating. Still skeptical of the e-mail and considering it potentially a hoax, she took a print out of it to Tharp who read it and told her it looked legitimate. Before she had a chance to call to verify it, a representative from the Yale admissions office called her, followed by the QuestBridge program congratulating her on her acceptance.

Now she is thinking about what to major in, what she will do for after school work and the future that has now opened up to her. For now she is considering a chemistry major and following up with medical school.

“I’m open to any possibilities that might be at Yale,” she said. “There is so much stuff there.”

Her parents said her acceptance to Yale is incredible.

“When we came here in 2006, we just came with two or three bags of clothing, but a bunch of hope that in this country she could get something better than what she was in Mexico,” Tomas said. “She was one of the brightest students in her elementary school. The main reason we moved to this country was to give her the opportunity to develop herself. Not even in our wildest dreams could we think or imagine that she would go to Yale.”

Tomas said his daughter is setting a good example for her younger sisters, Lucia, 13, and Maria, 11. He said people had told him about scholarships available for minorities, but he said he didn’t want a hand out for his daughter.

“I wanted her to make it on her own hard work,” Tomas said. “She deserves it because she’s worked hard. Here, people are rewarded when they work hard. This is a generous country. There is opportunity here if you go out and get it.”

Lopez-Rosas family is now preparing to send her out into a world none of them are familiar with.

“We are not going to be so selfish to keep her by our side and then sacrifice her opportunities,” Tomas said. “That happens in small towns in Mexico where the mothers keep the children with them. This is going to be for her betterment.”

To learn more about the QuestBridge program, visit www.questbridge.org.