My dad was born in Portugal, and my mom was born in England. My mom served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Portugal, where she met my father. I was born in England, and I lived there until two weeks after my 11th birthday when we moved to Portugal. This was a crazy time for us kids because none of us spoke Portuguese, only my mom and dad did. I entered this new world where everything — from the food to the smells and the people — was different. Everything was so crazy and scary. At 11 years old, I was taking the bus by myself, and if I got lost, I couldn’t speak the language to get the help that I needed. In hindsight, this chapter of my life was preparing me for my journey to UVU. I was learning to navigate a foreign country, speak a new language, and succeed in classes that were taught in a foreign language. I had this one professor in Portugal who would yell at me all the time because I couldn’t understand what she was saying to me. She told me that I would never amount to anything. I’m glad that I didn’t listen to her. Her aggressiveness toward me motivated me to prove her wrong and show her that I was going places.

During this time, I was facing a mountain of opposition. The two years we were there felt like an eternity as I was bullied, struggled in school because I didn’t have any friends, and became bulimic, living off a piece of bread and a granola bar each day. This was one of the darkest times of my life. When I turned 13, we moved to a town in the northern part of Portugal — and things turned around for me. I found a good group of friends, loved school, had a healthier eating schedule, and discovered that I liked learning. I would wake up at 5 in the morning so I could study my history books before going to school. Even though I liked learning, I had to put in twice the amount of work as my peers because I wasn’t learning in my native tongue. An assignment that would take them one hour to complete would take me two to three hours. My friends always asked me if I wanted to hang out with them, and I would tell them that I needed to do homework. I put my studies first because I had the goal of one day studying in the U.S. Because of this mentality, every assignment mattered to me. Most kids aren’t worried about their grades in the 7th grade, but I had a vision of what I wanted my life to be, and I fought with each completed assignment to achieve that dream.

When I was a senior in high school my dream changed, as I decided that I wanted to go to college in Portugal and later get a job in the U.S. I started college in Portugal at the University of Minho, majoring in Mandarin Chinese with a minor in Japanese. At that university it was standard to take 30 credits a semester. One of my classes in my first year was worth 15 credits and consisted of back-to-back Mandarin classes for four hours each day. All my classes were picked for me. After one semester of this rigorous lifestyle, my grades started going down, and I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. I thought, “I’m a good student, I study hard, and I am good at learning languages. Why is this happening to me?”

My feelings of frustration continued to build up, and I considered dropping out of school. My parents encouraged me to keep going with my education. I finished my first year and entered my second year of school, flunking half of my classes again. I couldn’t understand how this was possible. I was going to classes every day, studying in every waking hour, and yet I was still underachieving in my classes. By my third year of school, I had spent almost all my loan money and was still not doing well in school. So, in 2013, I dropped out of school and told my parents that I was moving to Utah. They said, “You’re just saying that because your sister just moved to Idaho.” I told my parents that I was serious and felt my life had become stagnant. I wasn’t reaching my full potential. As my dream of studying in the U.S. became reinvigorated, I started looking for jobs to save up money. After months of searching for a job with no success, I was a 23-year-old college dropout, living in my parents’ basement with no prospects. All my friends were either leaving on missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or moving to other countries to find a job. I didn’t know how I was going to raise the money to travel to the U.S. Out of the blue, my friend’s dad reached out to me and told me that he wanted to pay for my education. This was the break that I had been waiting for. I gratefully accepted his offer and told him that I would pay him back as soon as I could.

 

The plan was for me to attend a school that I had dreamt of attending in Utah, but my grades were not good enough from my prior university to be able to transfer over. So, I started at UVU with the intent of improving my grades and transferring to the other school after one semester. That semester I was able to improve my GPA from a 2.07 to a 3.8. Although it was a big improvement, my cumulative GPA was still too low to be accepted to the other school. The interesting thing was that I had grown to love UVU and no longer wanted to attend the other university. The only problem was that UVU was more expensive for an international student. Fortunately, my friend’s dad encouraged me to keep going to UVU and told me that he would still pay for my schooling. I went to school every semester for four years to graduate as quickly as possible.

At first, I wanted to be a political science major, thinking that I could make the biggest difference in the world by creating a better future through politics. After a while, I discovered that I was on a different wavelength than my fellow political science students, and I decided that political science wasn’t for me. From there, I switched over to communication studies in spring 2019 with the idea that there were many different jobs that I could go into with a communication studies major. I started taking 15 to 16 credits every semester so I could graduate with my degree on time. For the first time, I loved my major! I developed so much admiration for my professors. They inspired and motivated me to complete my degree and pursue a career in communication. I was especially motivated by my female professors who had their Ph.D.’s. It was such a change for me because in the political science department most of my professors had been male, and now most of my professors were female. They didn’t want me to fail my classes. They didn’t want to trick me on tests. They truly wanted me to learn and succeed.

My last semester was spring 2020, when the coronavirus hit. It was a very anticlimactic moment in my life because I had been a student for so long — and overnight all my classes went online. I missed the social interactions that I loved, and I lost my identity of being a student. Around this time, I also lost my job. For three months I was stuck at home, missing school. It seemed like school was the only thing that I could think about. I missed writing papers, doing research, and getting feedback from my professors. I decided that I needed to go back to grad school to get a Master of Communication and possibly a Ph.D.

When I first started college back in Portugal, I thought that I had everything figured out. However, life taught me that things rarely go as planned and that I should expect the unexpected. If someone had told me four years ago that I would graduate with a degree in communication from UVU, I wouldn’t have believed them. I would not trade my time at UVU for anything. My professors inspired me to dream big, and so I want to do what they did for me and become a college-level professor. I want to give back to schools like UVU and let students know that no dream is too big.