Giselle Muriel prepares cookies for the welcome event at the prestigious Barnard College where she was accepted and where she will study with all expenses covered.
“Being able to go to a private school of my dreams without paying anything is so exciting for me and my family that they can see that their sacrifices were worth it,” said Muriel.
Her mother has always taken care of Giselle and her older sister, supporting them with their education while their father worked.
Fathers and daughters.
“To encourage them, because we always told them, ‘we don’t have the money to leave them, but the only thing we can leave them is their studies,'” said mother Myriam Mera.
Muriel is aware that she would never have been able to go to Barnard without a scholarship.
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“I didn’t want to think about that, about having to go into debt to get an education,” Muriel added.
The young woman was selected to the QuestBridge university preparation program in 2022, with which she was able to apply to Barnard College and obtain a scholarship of 300 thousand dollars.
To apply to the Questbridge College Preparatory Program, students must have a 3.9 GPA and come from families earning $65,000 a year or less.
I’m going to college.
Long Island High School counselor Norma Feriz-Gordon helped Muriel through the scholarship application process through the Questbridge program. And a second scholarship with the Urban Arts program that awards $60,000 to an outstanding student to help her college career.
Muriel will study computer science. Her goal is to be a software engineer, writing code. But she also wants to help young people from the Latino community to get interested in this field.
“I want to be like a model for them to tell them ‘look, I can do it, you can do it too'”.
