Yulin Ma

Yulin started college with enthusiasm, exploring various clubs such as archery, taekwondo and breakdancing. She eventually settled into the Asian-Pacific Student Alliance (APSA), helping APSA with their annual high school conference, an event aimed at giving high school students from underserved communities in San Diego a chance to experience college. It piqued her interest in mentoring and counseling young people. “I was a first-generation student from an underserved area myself, so I related a lot to these students.”

Born in Vietnam, Yulin was nine when her family moved to Los Angeles. In the summer before she started college, she was chosen to take part in the Bank of America Student Leader Program which allowed her to intern at a non-profit organization in addition to flying her to Washington, D.C. for a leadership summit. “I had no idea how I was chosen as one of five [student leaders] to represent Los Angeles. Many attendees were recently accepted into Ivy League schools, while others were starting their own nonprofits. The only business I was running was taking my siblings’ orders when I went to Starbucks, and even then the profit was minuscule!”

Soon, differences didn’t matter. “We explored D.C. together, learned through workshops together, and in response to the violence that was happening in the U.S. in the summer of 2016, we stood on top of the Lincoln Memorial together and chanted, ‘I am the voice. I will lead not follow. I will create, not destroy. I am a leader. I am a force for good. I am a force for peace. Defy the odds. Set a new standard. Step up. Step up. Step up.’ I had never felt that kind of solidarity.”

Yulin was inspired by the student leaders who “still believed that things could be better despite all the violence." This experience inspired her to take ethnic studies classes at UC San Diego where she learned about inequalities that "completely changed the way I saw the world.”

Currently, Yulin is looking ahead to a master’s degree and a career as a psychologist in an inner-city school. “This would combine education and psychology, two fields that I am passionate about,” she says. She was inspired by a Humans of New York post where a student from a New York school in a rough, high-dropout neighborhood talked about how his principal, Ms. Lopez, influenced him to stay in school. Yulin hopes to become like Ms. Lopez in her efforts to challenge the school-to-prison pipeline that many students from inner-city schools fall into.