Jessica: Why I Chose Pacific

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

Hello, everybody. My name is Jessica. I'm currently 4th year student at University of the Pacific. And today I'm here because I wanted to share with you all a little bit about myself, a little bit about University of the Pacific itself, and also why I decided to go there and how I ended up here where I am. If you had told me in, like my sophomore year of high school or even my junior year, honestly, that was going to end up going to University of the Pacific for college, I would have asked you, What's that and where is it? Because I literally had no idea it existed for a long time. So, like I said, my name is Jessica. I'm in my last year at Pacific. I am from Glendora, California, which is in SoCal, and I'm double majoring in applied math economics with a minor in Data Science. University of the Pacific. It's a four year private university in Stockton, California. For those of you who don't know where Stockton is, I didn't know where Stockton was. I you're looking at the map of California, take where Sacramento is and where San Francisco is and you just go whoop. Basically, where they meet is where Stockton is, so it ends up being about a little under an hour from Sacramento and an hour 15 ish from San Francisco and the Bay Area. So it's definitely up there in NorCal. So the way that I actually found out about UOP was instead of looking for colleges, I was looking for scholarships that were offered at colleges. I found out about the Powell scholarship, which is Pacific's highest academic merit scholarship that they offered. It ends up covering 90% of tuition, as well as stipends for study abroad and a creative or research project. While I was applying for that, I realized, wait I kind of actually need to apply for the school itself too. So then I did my Pacific application super easy. You could just add on the common app. It's free now. So might as well. And then I ended up getting contacted. to come to campus to do an interview for the scholarship. First impressions. Very first thing I noticed was that it was a beautiful campus. It was so so pretty. If you haven't seen pictures, please go Look, um I wasn't expecting to see a campus like that in California. I'm from California and I wasn't expecting that. I remember when I was there, I was supposed to meet up at a certain hall at a certain time, and there was one point where I went up to someone to ask them like, Hey, do you know where this place is? It's just a random student walking by and they're like, You know what? Like I'm not quite sure where that is. But you know what? They paused for a second, found someone else who was random walking by, and was like, Hey, do you know where this place is? She's trying to find where it is. And then that person helped me and I was like, Wow, that's really amazing that people, like are willing to stop each other, are willing to talk to each other. It's not just a whole bunch of strangers walking around this place living their own lives. People are willing and wanting to interact with people and talk with them and figure out what everyone's doing there. I know it seems weird because I was just visiting the campus for a day, but while I was there and I started to picture myself living my life as a student there, I felt like I was going to be part of this community, which was something I really wanted. And there I really felt like I would have that. I felt like I would have those people. They're supporting me because I saw in all the students that were there already. They had their friends. They had people supporting them, even strangers walking by students that they didn't know, they were ready to talk. to, ready to have a conversation, was ready to help me. I ended up getting offered the scholarship - the Powell scholarship, which I'm so, so, so grateful for it. And at that point I was like, Wow, it's financially an option for me now and I really loved the campus on. So all in all, here I am four years after and I'm still so grateful for the communities that I found there and the chance that I had to build my life there and spend these years learning new things, meeting new people, having people support me, having these opportunities presented to me and being able to share it with so many amazing people. It was definitely the right decision for me