Studying at an Ivy League university can be complicated, but not impossible, if you fight for your dreams, like the young Yelissa López, who is in her third year in Applied Physics at Columbia University.
“I didn’t think I could make it and other than that everything paid for, that was a really big relief (a relief) for us.”
For the 20-year-old, studying physics was never in her plans, much less, she thought she would go this far because the conditions in which she had grown up were not in her favor.
“When I arrived at Columbia, I was meeting all these students who had so much money, they went to the best schools, to get here and I was seeing how the system didn’t help my community move forward and that was something that hurt me. a lot started”, explains Yelissa.
Growing up in Castle Hill, a humble neighborhood in the Bronx, Lopez always knew she wanted to help those who didn’t have the same opportunities as she did.
“That I could bring these two worlds together, to raise my community further, I could connect them with a photographer from NYU, I could connect them with a designer from Columbia to help them have more promotion and push them forward”, he maintains.
And so it was that he turned his knowledge of engineering and his love for fashion into a venture to help those with fewer opportunities to enter markets such as fashion.
“One day I had a dream and in that dream I had a website for all the different companies of my friends, and then from that dream I believed that this was a very good idea,” López tells us.
And out of that dream, Upcomers was born, a website that provides endless resources to minority small businesses to help them gain exposure and business success.
“They don’t know how to do their business, they don’t know how to manage their money, they have never learned that, so I wanted to give them the opportunity to have that ease of how to manage their business,” he adds.
But this is not the only way that this young woman gives back to her community, she currently teaches quantum computing to low-income students.
“I want to make sure that the field is diverse and I want to give more opportunity for people who look like me,” he warns.
