Teri's Desire To Attend Western Washington University

I grew up in a tract home, surrounded by other tracts of homes, surrounded by an urban sprawl of similar homes punctuated with strip malls in suburban San Diego. My father drove away every morning to his job and my mother stayed home and knew all her neighbors.

The most secondary education anyone in my family has achieved is my father’s Associate’s Degree. He combined his military experience and work experience to test out of certain requirements and completed night classes to earn the rest while I was a child. Like my mother, I married directly after graduating high school, eventually finding work in banking.

As a young newlywed I could only find jobs in retail at the local mall. I had to break into the banking industry by completing a free county “Regional Occupational Program” class to learn how to be a bank teller, where we practiced cashing checks out of shoe boxes with Monopoly money. Shortly thereafter, I landed a job answering the phone at a small bank in San Diego, eventually transferring to the real estate finance department where my salary stagnated for the next five or six years. I watched many college graduates get promoted above me, some of which I had even trained as new hires. I never thought I could surpass my father’s level of education, especially since I didn’t have the advantage of his military experience.

As a young married mother, the pattern of my day was certainly different than that of my mother’s. My days started before dawn, rushing off to day care, commuting to work, and in the evening rushing back again in reverse order. I drove into my garage, pushed a button to close the door, and never knew my neighbors. I didn’t know what “community” meant. I hadn’t experienced it.

Eventuall...

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...s to low income housing in Whatcom County. I know now what I am capable of doing, and I know now what I want to do. I want a career helping people like those folks downtown with nowhere warm to be, folks like Juan and his mother, and folks like my parents who find themselves running out of options. I don’t want them to feel marginalized; I want them to feel that they are productive and included members of our community. I want to attend Western because I want to enrich my city. I feel that the way I can best help to accomplish this end is to earn a degree in Human Services, and put the skills I acquire to good use right here in the community that has been so good to me. My dream job is to work in a local agency facilitating housing for the underserved in Whatcom County. Please accept me to Western Washington University. This is where I want to live and learn.