On Oct 7 the Hispanic Student Association prepared for their annual Latino Youth Leadership Conference.
Each year, HSA hosts a group of high school students in a conference centered around promoting higher education.
Nayely Vargas, HSA vice president and music education sophomore, said HSA members have seen many positive results from the conference.
“Our numbers may be small,” Vargas said. “And I feel like our impact in the community might fly under the radar at OCU, but it’s not like we do this because we want to. We have seen results.”
She said these results are really needed.
“I was the first generation ever to go to college,” she said. “Though I didn’t have this conference specifically, I had the benefit of someone to walk me through the process.”
Vargas said that sometimes Hispanic and Latin youth feel pressured to help out with family, or to get a job instead of pursuing higher education. Often, paying for college is too difficult.
“If it’s hard enough for someone who is a citizen to pay for it, just imagine how hard it is for someone who isn’t,” she said. “ People come to the United States for those kinds of opportunities.”
HSA is group on campus that focuses on empowering the Hispanic and Latin communities.
“Other than hanging out, we try to do as much as we can for the Latino community around OKC. The main thing that we do is our Latino Youth Leadership Conference,” Vargas said.
This year, the conference was from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Oct. 7 in Meinders School of Business.
The conference’s main purpose is to promote higher education to Hispanic and Latin students in nearby high schools, public as well as non-public. HSA invites a variety of speakers, including one keynote speaker to end the day. The speakers generally have experienced going through the process of higher education and job searching as a Hispanic minority.
There conference also included a college fair composed of other universities that promotes and represents many different college options for high school students.
White said she loves being part of HSA.
“It’s a safe place to grow, not only from a Hispanic background, but as an independent person who is willing to go out into a very diverse world and actively participate in each endeavor that is presented to them,” she said.
“We want to promote equal opportunity especially in the Latino community because there’s a bias. People automatically assume certain people are not capable of getting an education. It’s frustrating to get clumped into that category. No one should feel like they can’t be educated.”
HSA is a smaller organization compared to other campus groups on campus, but they try to empower people in the local community, Vargas said. She said people don’t necessarily have to be Hispanic to join HSA.
For more information on HSA or the volunteering opportunity at the conference, email White at ocwhite@my.okcu.edu.
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