Liana Phillips

Student

“I’m really happy I ended up at SMC because the level of education is wonderful. And for the price, it’s a steal.”

She’d been on the academic fast track since elementary school. “I was in a Spanish immersion program, and in the fifth grade, I spent a month in Mexico as an exchange student,” says Liana Phillips. Later she spent a year studying in Spain and, after high school, worked for seven months on a kibbutz in Israel taking intensive classes in Hebrew. “I worked in a ‘baby house’ on the kibbutz and had to do a lot of jobs I wasn’t necessarily enthusiastic about,” she says. So Liana prepared to move on and to enter Stanford. And then she got the bad news.

“My father got cancer,” she recalls. “So suddenly we couldn’t afford the tuition expenses.” But adversity quickly showed Liana the bright side. Her father got well. And she ended up at SMC. “I really love the student body here,” says Liana who is vice-president of the Hillel Club. “It’s so diverse, and there are students from almost every nation. And since my father is black and my mother is Jewish, I’ve grown up in a really multi-cultural community that is really mirrored at SMC. My own family has given me dimension and perspective on all people,” she says. “And I think it’s a shame when conflicts arise between communities. Hopefully, we’re learning to sort these things out on campus.”

Now immersed in her pre-med program, Liana admits that college study presents stresses-even for world-traveling, multi-lingual scholars. “This semester, I started out on the wrong foot,” she says, laughing. “I have this calculus class at 7 in the morning and… Well, I may have to do a little ‘juggling’.”

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