Rewarding Paths

By Julie Cardozo 

Maria Lina Vasquez is a high school counselor at Yerba Buena High school. One of the things she does as a counselor is help students find career paths they may be interested in when they go to college. 

But for Vasquez, being a high school counselor is more rewarding than anything since she’s an important part to shaping the high schooler's paths.

Vasquez’s main motivators were counselors themselves, seeing the influence they had on the path high school students would take, along with just how much an educator could help them find their own way after high school. 

Vasquez:  “I think working in a high school setting when I was in college I really had - I was working closely with the counselors out there and I really liked them, I liked the way they did things and so I kind of looked up to them and asked them questions and they kind of guided me through the counseling career ”

When becoming a counselor, it doesn’t only mean helping students fix their school schedules a thousand times. For Vasquez, having the knowledge about different colleges and career paths doesn't only help students from Yerba Buena, but also allows her to help check in on people in her personal life.

For brief moments in their lives, Vasquez checks in whenever she can to see how they’re doing, but in doing so, also motivates them, being that she’s a first generation college student among her siblings. 

Vasquez: “Checking in with those high school age students, or nieces or family members, that they're able to be motivated, right? Because I went to college, my sister went to college, and so, they're able to see that” 

At Yerba Buena, Vasquez isn’t only there to be a counselor that shows you different colleges or shoves grades in your face, she makes connections with the students at YB and learns about the different personalities they have.

In doing so, she finds out that students may not want to go to college or sometimes they’re not sure what they want to do after high school. 

But because she knows just how stressed a student can be, she never just focuses on just the college part of their lives, instead, Vasquez still sticks to supporting the student in what they decide to do after high school.

Vasquez: “I feel like now I believe, obviously everyone's paths are different, right? There's some students that don't want to go to college, some students for different reasons, and so I feel like my job is just to provide them with information and whatever they decide, you know, for me to guide them in that direction”

In helping students decide their futures, Vasquez finds the job to be rewarding not because it’s something she does for a living, but because working as an educator/counselor, she sees the once freshman students decide what they want to do after high school when they become seniors. 

For Vasquez, that’s what she finds to be the most important thing in any role as an educator. 

Vasquez: “I really enjoy working with, you know, the freshman students, seeing them grow, seeing how they mature and how they decide you know what they want to do once they're seniors. I think it's a very rewarding job, I think anything in education is a very rewarding job and yeah, I would strongly encourage people to become counselors.”