"My advice to you is that you make a community for yourself... You are important, you matter and you deserve to achieve your dreams just as much as anyone else."
Joash's Journey
Tell us about yourself and any challenges you have had to overcome?
I’m a first-generation college graduate and international student from South Africa. I originally came to the U.S. to study acting, but switched to engineering when I became a 2014 STEM cohort member. It took me 8 years to complete my degree. During the process, I struggled a lot with being financially disadvantaged on top of being an international student and even experienced homelessness and food insecurity. I was disallowed from returning to SMC in 2015 due to immigration issues, and was almost kicked out of university twice for not being able to pay for tuition. However, during the process I also won numerous scholarships, served as a Phi Theta Kappa Vice President, 2016-2017 SMC President’s Ambassador, Sustainable Works Workshop Leader, 2016-2017 STEM tutor, 2017 UCLA SRI participant, 2018-2019 Engineers Without Borders President and was a civil engineering intern for Next Step Design Inc. from 2019-2020. I finally became a Civil Engineering graduate in Fall 2020.
Where do you currently work?
I currently work as an Engineering Intern at Civiltec Engineering Inc., Monrovia. As an intern I assist project managers and engineers with drafting construction plans using CAD software, writing reports for city water districts, creating hydraulic models of local water distribution systems and analyzing water consumption and water demand data for agencies in the Southern California region.
Something you loved about being part of the STEM program, perhaps a specific memorable experience
The thing I loved most about SRI was having a place to belong. Being an international student, I often felt both like an outsider and lost, because I didn’t have the same experiences as other students due to my foreign status and had no family with me as I navigated school. My most memorable experience in SRI was tutoring in the STEM lab. Seeing the joy that students felt as their academics went from being frustrating to understandable made me feel like I was being the person I needed when I was taking my classes. The SRI became my home away from home and the students and faculty became my family.
If you had to give advice to yourself when you first started at SMC, what would you say?
All the suffering I experienced came from feeling too insignificant to ask for help, being too afraid to reach out for resources or support and making the assumption that getting through school was something I had to do all on my own. My advice to you is that you make a community for yourself as you try to get your degree: study in groups, reach out to your professors, speak up when you don’t understand and ask for help from peers, faculty or the STEM program when you feel stuck. Any success that I’ve had comes from the faculty, friends, family members and good Samaritans that fought for me when I faced times where all hope seemed lost. You are important, you matter and you deserve to achieve your dreams just as much as anyone else.