On this special episode of Highest Aspirations, we're sitting down to speak with 2021 Ellevation Scholarship Winner Sirenia Garcia from Deer Park ISD in Texas.

Sirenia was born and raised in Texas and plans on attending the University of St. Thomas in Houston in the fall, where she will be studying Music Education and minoring in psychology. She hopes to become a school counselor or school principal - we love to hear that!

As you'll hear in the episode, Sirenia is very open about the struggles she faced in school as a multilingual learner, as well as the important role that her teachers had in encouraging her to persevere. She shares great advice for current students on staying diligent and motivated despite challenges they might face. We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did. If you'd like to hear more conversations with scholarship recipients, check out the Scholarship Winners playlist on our Spotify. 

If you have an idea for a topic or guest for a future highest aspirations episode, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.