As the last echoes of summer break transitioned into the controlled chaos of a new academic year, two students settled behind microphones and launched a new season of the San José City College’s award-winning podcast, Take a Paws.
The second season opened with the candor of college students who have just traded summer days for syllabi. “I can’t believe the summer is over,” said Brett Ohene-Adofo, a business administration major with his sights set on transferring to UC Berkeley. His co-host, Ariana Ramirez, laughed in recognition. She had spent part of her summer working as an SJCC student ambassador; now she was three weeks into a hastily reconsidered major in sociology and journalism and freshly installed as president of Jaggy’s Trading Post, the student thrifting club.
The 3-2-1 Challenge
The first guest, Blake Balajadia, SJCC’s Director of Outreach, Student Life and Community Standards, arrived with an offering that sounded almost like folk wisdom: the “3-2-1 challenge.” Meet three new friends. Find two mentors in your intended field. Try one campus resource, such as tutoring, food assistance, or a counselor’s office, before a crisis has already set in. “Get it before you need it,” he said, a line that landed with the weight of something he’d learned the hard way when watching students seek help too late.
Balajadia carefully framed the advice not as a checklist but as an antidote to a particular kind of collegiate loneliness. Everyone feels awkward walking into a new room, he said; the trick is to get involved before the awkwardness disappears. “The most awkward part is actually going through the door,” he told the hosts, describing student clubs less as extracurricular flourishes than as small, low-stakes rehearsals for the kind of connections that always happen in college and beyond.
He was equally direct about the economics of student life, noting that a free VTA transit pass or a bag of groceries from the Jaguar Market may not put money in a student’s pocket, but can keep it there.
The Team Behind Recruitment
Later, two recruiters from the Outreach Team, Gabriela Garcia and Gabriela Gonzalez Gomez, described the invisible architecture that gets a student from a high school college fair to a City College classroom: application workshops, orientation days, and an Applied Not Enrolled campaign aimed at students who take the first step and then quietly vanish before the second. It is impactful work that is mostly unseen, and it was refreshing to hear it narrated aloud.
The “Gabys,” as they are affectionately known on campus, were themselves products of the kind of outreach process they now help to run, a fact that made their descriptions of the college’s on-campus enrollment push, known as ROAR Days, all the more personal. Students often assume they know a campus from having driven past it, they said. It is only once they walk its paths on foot that the place begins to feel larger and more real.
The hosts, to their credit, did not let the episode drift into pure institutional messaging. There was an unhurried detour into coffee orders from SJCC’s KJ’s Cafe. Everyone talked about their go-to orders. The Gaby’s described how they apply cinnamon liberally to their coffee, a reminder that campus life is often made of small rituals.
Character Counts
The new athletic director, Tommy Abdenour, closed the podcast with stories from his years around the Golden State Warriors and with a definition of coaching that doubled, deliberately or not, as a definition of college itself: “A coach is a teacher,” he said. “Athletics is the best learning tool for life.”
Abdenour, whose father worked as an athletic trainer for the Warriors for more than two decades, spoke of his own path back into college athletics after several years at four-year institutions, describing the adjustment to community college rules with something like relief rather than reluctance.
What he was looking for in recruiting student-athletes, he said, had less to do with statistics than with character. It is an answer familiar in the world of college sports, and it seemed to fit naturally alongside everything else the guests had said about showing up, trying out the unfamiliar thing, and trusting that the rest would follow.
Watch the season two, first episode of Take a Paws
