Written by: Ashley Neyra 🇵🇪 Headshot of Emily Araniva. (Emelyn Gomez) Emily Araniva starts her day in her childhood home in Prince George’s County. She gets ready, gathers her things, and commutes to the University of Maryland. While balancing classes and working at Vigilante Coffee Company, she found a space where she could grow as a concert photographer at WMUC, UMD’s student-run radio station. Araniva is a first-generation Salvadoran student and the middle child of thre

Written by: Sophia da Silva 🇧🇷 Headshot of Daisy Navarro. (Emelyn Gomez) Daisy Navarro has known that she wanted to be a doctor for a long time, but as the first in her family to attend college, she struggled to know how to get there. “I had some sense of what I could do, but it was just difficult knowing what resources are out there as first-gen,” Navarro said. Navarro was accepted to several of the 31 colleges that she applied to in high school but didn’t have the money t

Written by: Sophia da Silva 🇧🇷 Headshot of Dennis Gomez. (Emelyn Gomez) Dennis Gomez contemplated changing his mechanical engineering major about three times a semester. “Even though it drives me crazy, staying up nights doing work or studying, looking at all those equations, I'm glad I stuck with it,” Gomez said. Since he was a kid, Gomez was fascinated by how things worked, and math clicked in a way that words never could. “When I finally got it, that light bulb thing, th