Scholar Stories
Ocotillo Wells, by Way of Humboldt
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Cradle-2-Graduation StoriesGraduate
This scholarship motivated me first and foremost to apply to college.
Jasmine Fernandez
B.A. Cultural Anthropology · Cal Poly Humboldt, December 2023
Read that sentence again, because it is doing more work than it looks. Not that the scholarship helped her afford college. That it is the reason she applied.
Jasmine Fernandez took a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from Cal Poly Humboldt in December 2023 — a campus in the redwoods, roughly seven hundred miles from Borrego Springs and about as different a landscape as California can offer.
- Imagination Library
- Family Literacy
- TK Academy
- Learning Academy
- Scholarship, completed
- Graduate, completed
The station that mattered was the one that made the application feel possible.
Then she came back to the desert
She is employed with the Cultural Resources department at the Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area, half an hour east of Borrego Springs, where she intends to keep developing her anthropological and archaeological skills. Cultural resources work is the business of identifying and protecting what is already in the ground, which in this part of California is a great deal.
Alongside it she has been doing volunteer, ethnographic, and birth work in her community, and she has been looking at midwifery programs in California. Licensure means a three-year program and a national registry examination at the end of it.
- Degree
- B.A. Cultural Anthropology
- Campus
- Cal Poly Humboldt
- Finished
- December 2023
- Now
- Cultural Resources, Ocotillo Wells
- Next
- Midwifery, a three-year program
The devotion to our academic success and professional endeavors, as students from our small-town community, never goes unnoticed.Jasmine Fernandez
Why “apply” is the hard part
Borrego Springs High School graduates a small class each year. For a student in it, the obstacle is often not grades and not admission. It is the private arithmetic that happens before an application is ever filled in, when a teenager decides whether people like them go to university at all.
A local scholarship answers that question early and in public. Jasmine describes the award as what motivated her to apply, and then as what she was determined to live up to once she was accepted. Both halves matter; the second one is what got her to December 2023.
In her own words
As a recipient of the BASIC Scholar Award, I’ve developed a deep gratitude and appreciation for the incredible community work that BASIC offers.
I started my academic journey to receive my bachelor’s because of this scholarship, and I am very humbled to say I’ve completed this journey and am ready to continue learning from my advisors, colleagues, and peers.
Jasmine Fernandez
More graduates, in their own words: BASIC Salutes Its Graduates.
The application is the barrier. A scholarship is how you lower it.
BASIC’s awards go to graduating seniors, to former students still studying, and to adult learners in the Borrego Springs school district.