ISG would like to congratulate and commend its very own Human Biology and Society student, Nicolas Cevallo, for sharing his experience of microaggression challenges with the UCLA community as a student of color. Cevallos’s perspective serves as call for awareness, advocacy and acknowledgment of many students who share in similar challenges in academia.
“As a Latinx student, I find myself, along with many other students of color, having to conquer more than weekly problem sets and quizzes. We consistently fight for the respect and approval from peers and faculty that we belong on campus. And we fight off discrimination in our everyday lives while also struggling with impostor syndrome – when an individual feels like an intellectual fraud when they have achieved success in rigorous situations.
During my first two years at UCLA, I experienced many preconceived expectations from certain peers and faculty. I heard comments such as, “Nicolas, you are the first smart Mexican I have ever met,” or even had a teaching assistant triple check that I received the correct score because he could not believe that I could have received the second highest grade in the class. These experiences made me feel like an impostor and believe each time I succeeded, it was luck and not the hard work I put in.”
Please find Nicolas Cevallos’s full article here.