Nicole [email protected]

I am currently a Junior student at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. My roots are Hispanic and in August 2020 I will have completed my first year here in the United States, New York. I studied one year of college in my home country,Ecuador, and came to the U.S. as a transfer student. During my years in Ecuador, counting high school, I have always had a passion for being part of community service, any type: tutoring, teaching, help reconstructing or improving a building, among others. During those years I did not care about labelling my future with a specific degree, besides I was not sure at all, I just knew I wanted to spend my entire life doing a work outdoors, helping others, feeling essential for other's life, and trying to help people to be better — during this whole year I decided to do, besides my major, a certificate in translation and interpretation in spanish after discovering I have been using my first language to help small groups: teaching kids spanish history, tutoring, help as a translator on churches. My future had no name, and honestly I did not even gave it such importance by then. One of my most exciting community service I did was to travel for a week as a translation assistant for American doctors. That specific trip made me use most of my skills, physical and psychological. Having had the opportunity to see the necessity by myself is something I would not change at all, on the contrary, it made me wanted to explore more and somehow solve them all.
I felt the necessity to protect my country, or at least the one I am building my future. It was last year that I decided to focus on helping people, including the ones who affect others — prosecutors are not born as criminals, they just have an illness that need to be treated.
From that idea my future degree had a name: criminology. I will be sincere and say that this idea began with a television program, however I am not afraid to study it more in depth, and so far, every day I get more excited just by projecting myself working by any of these groups who fights for justice. I am a Latina and my ambitions are high, but I don't think they are impossible.