Four San José City College alumni took the SJCC Theater stage last week to share their stories with this year’s Summer Bridge cohort, offering the 175 incoming students a preview of where a City College education can lead — and reassurance that the road rarely runs in a straight line.
The panel, moderated by Dr. Juan Gamboa of SJCC’s Chicanx/Ethnic Studies program, featured Sofia Valenzuela, Serafin Andrade, Isabelle Martinez and Juancristobal Jacinto, four alumni whose paths took them through SJCC and on to the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, San José State and beyond. Each spoke about the obstacles they faced as community college students and the people and programs at SJCC that helped them push through.
Valenzuela, a first-generation student who enrolled at SJCC in 2019, said she arrived unsure of her major but drawn to medicine. She navigated her first years of college through the pandemic, staying connected through MEChA and campus mentoring programs before transferring to UC Berkeley, where she completed her premedical coursework and worked in a lab studying placental cells as part of the California Preterm Birth Initiative.
She later worked as a medical assistant at an OB-GYN office serving Spanish-speaking patients in San José and Morgan Hill before enrolling in the Master of Public Health program at UCLA. She’s spending this summer back in San José, interning in the Santa Clara County epidemiology department.
“If you’re planning on going to medical school, do all of your prerequisites here, because it’s a faster, better learning environment than trying to fit them in at a four-year university,” Valenzuela told students.
Andrade shared a different kind of journey. He left high school after his freshman year, driven out by feelings of imposter syndrome. At 19, he was incarcerated and spent 19 years in prison and immigration detention combined before his release in 2022. It was behind bars that he discovered a love of learning, first in spite of a system that tried to keep him from books and educational programming, and then through an independent study program that helped him earn his GED, and later college courses in sociology and ethnic studies.
After his release, he settled in San José and enrolled at SJCC. He found his footing at UC Berkeley through NAVCAL and Underground Scholars, campus programs supporting justice-system impacted, foster, parenting and other non-traditional students. He is currently participating in Labor Summer through UC Berkeley and organizing rideshare drivers with a local labor union.
“The biggest obstacle in front of me has been myself — the idea that I wasn’t smart enough,” Andrade told students. “Finding a community here gave me the reason to keep fighting.”
Martinez traced her path back to Summer Bridge itself — she was once a student in the same program, entering SJCC in 2021 through its arts and English offerings. Ethnic studies courses redirected her academic path, and she went on to work as an academic coach for the Summer Bridge program for two years while earning her degree.
She transferred to San José State, where she now works with the EOP Transfer Connect program supporting other transfer students and recently presented research on the impact of ethnic studies coursework on students’ educational experience.
“Get involved,” Martinez advised the incoming students. “You need people along the way, and it will help you more than you expect.”
Juancristobal Jacinto, the panel’s final speaker, said he didn’t arrive at SJCC excited about community college — he’d hoped to go straight to a four-year school. A tough first chemistry course led him to daily tutoring sessions and friendships that carried him through his two and a half years at SJCC.
He became active in MEChA and Associated Student Government, helped organize Día de los Muertos events and community conferences, and represented SJCC at a national conference for underrepresented students in the sciences. A summer research program at Stanford pushed him outside his comfort zone before he transferred to UCLA in fall 2024, where he has volunteered with the American Red Cross on disaster preparedness outreach in the wake of last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, as well as with refugee families through a refugee children’s center in LA.
“Everybody in your classes, your dorms, the people you see every day — they’re all there for the same reason you are,” Jacinto said. “Take the time to talk to people. You’ll learn something every day.”
Summer Bridge got off to a strong start this year, welcoming 175 incoming students across six cohorts as they prepared for the transition to SJCC this fall. Students are enrolled in ETH 30 (Chicanx Studies), ETH 27 (Introduction to Race and Ethnicity), ENGR 003 (Introduction to Engineering, which also includes students from the Alum Rock Union School District), GUIDE 130 (College Life Success, offered with NextUp) and MATH 503 (Math Refresher).
Alongside their coursework, students took part in weekly tutoring, counseling, college success workshops, financial aid support and community-building activities — including a campus scavenger hunt, art day and game day — led by SJCC’s student leaders.
