Adriana Gonzalez '26: Finding a Community Far from Home

“I wanted to leave the city for college,” says Adriana Gonzalez ’26. “I’m from the Bronx, so Clarkson is a very different experience for me.”

“The location and people are unlike anything I have encountered before.” For Gonzalez, that’s a good thing. “If an opportunity presents itself, I will take it. It’s just how I am,” she says.

Gonzalez is double majoring in Psychology and Finance and has a minor in Law. It’s an intensive program of study, but not unexpected for someone who has always set a high bar for herself.

“When I was in high school, I was an afterschool intern and a tutor, and I was involved in Student Council. At the end of my sophomore year, I applied for and received a two-year Human Resources apprenticeship at Accenture. I graduated high school with 62 credits – which
was a lot more than I needed.”

The skills she learned at Accenture – Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Canva, a graphic design tool -- have all come in handy in her Clarkson classes and myriad extracurricular activities.

In her first year at Clarkson, Gonzalez joined the HEOP Advisory Council as the freshman representative and served as the Marketing Chair for SHPE (the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers).

Last March, she traveled to Albany with Clarkson HEOP staff and a few students to attend the New York State Legislatures’ Advocacy Day. “We were advocating on behalf of the HEOP budget. It was an opportunity to talk about my own experience and how these programs benefit students like me, as a first-generation college student. Preserving state educational funding is important.”

Gonzalez has developed close friendships as well as positive working relationships with her professors. She has learned a few new things, too – like riding a horse, which she did for the first time last spring.

This summer, she is staying on campus working on virtual reality and brain function research under the mentorship of Assistant Professor of Psychology Lauren Petley. “We are studying the early experiences of STEM learners using Virtual Reality so that we can collect data and figure
out a way to introduce VR in a classroom setting as a new and effective tool for students to learn neuroscience.”

Gonzalez readily acknowledges that she has already benefited from the opportunities she has had at Clarkson, “but it’s the people here who have really made an impact on me.”

“A big part of the college experience is the people you meet. I have found a real community here at Clarkson.”