Putting aside all feelings of apprehension, 19-year-old Camila Villavizar Gomez decided she had to do the unthinkable. She had to leave her home country of Peru and contact her father, a man she had never met, to ask if she could stay with him in the United States while attending college.
“I reached out to him and then after so many tries, he said ok, let’s do it.” Villavizar Gomez says, “Everything started moving, but then it will be kind of like, ‘Oh, you can come this month. But no, don’t come this month because it’s not gonna work out.’ And come the other month and, you know, then it would just be a lot of like, let’s do it. But then you can’t do it.”
Eventually a date was set. Unfortunately, when she arrived her relationship with her father did not improve.
“There was a reason why I never met him,” Villavizar Gomez says. “[He’s] just a very abusive, very narcissistic sort of guy. We were never able to advance our relationship like father and daughter..”
Villavizar Gomez says she turned her attention to her education instead and enrolled at Mercer.
While taking English 101, she met Diana Samchuk, a second year Advertising and Graphic Design major. Samchuk had moved here from Ukraine around the same time as Villavizar Gomez’s move from Peru, which sparked a bond between them.
Samchuk says, “She feels like my mother and friend at the same time. Whatever obstacle gets in the way, [Camila] will find a way to fight it right away.” Samchuk continues, “Every conversation that we have is really meaningful and I feel like together we could make some meaningful change in this world.”
In addition to creating friendships, Villavizar Gomez excelled at her school work. She was recruited into the Honors program and maintained a GPA high enough to qualify for the Phi Theta Kappa academic honors society. She also found a job working at Student Life and Leadership. She became president of the Latin American Club and the Student Government Public Relations Officer.
In addition to balancing her many other responsibilities, Villavizar Gomez is working on a manuscript. She says the skills she uses in her creative writing aren’t ones that she was taught in her school in Peru. She says her Catholic high school “was very much focused on math,” so she built stronger reading and writing skills on her own.
She says, “It was actually out of high school that I learned how to properly read something you know, like reading comprehension sort of stuff.”
Once she started at Mercer, a person who spotted her skills was English Professor Dr. Barbara Hamilton who says “Camila is eternally curious and she’s willing to work far beyond the norm.” She adds, “she’s more of a graduate student in her approach to learning than a second-year community college student. I think she’s someone who could transfer to Princeton and immediately do great.”
Dr. Hamilton also nominated Villavizar Gomez for the Summer Princeton Transfer Scholars Initiative Program (TSI) in 2023, which was the first year it ran. She was accepted and enrolled in two for-credit Princeton courses: Humanistic Approaches to Media and Data, and Research and Argument in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
She describes her time at Princeton as, “Intense. They had a lot of expectations of us which was nice. There was also a lot of support psychologically, and academically. I bonded with a lot of the people there and I felt like the faculty actually cared about what they were doing. That was really nice.”
One of Villavizar Gomez’s TSI professors was Dr. Keith Shaw, Director of Transfer and Outreach at the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity where the TSI program is housed at Princeton, and also taught Research and Argument in the Humanities and Social Sciences for the semester.
Dr. Shaw’s favorite part of working with Villavizar Gomez was a paper she wrote investigating an anime series. Dr. Shaw says, “Camila did this amazing job working with Kimberly Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality to make an argument about how best to interpret this literary work. And it was amazing”
He continues, “It was a paper that I could see not just a Princeton student doing, but being like the springboard for graduate level work. I mean, she’s an amazingly bright student and I think she was going to do well for herself, whether she participated in TSI or not.”
TSI provided Villavizar Gomez a sense of direction. She says, “I finished my first year at Mercer not knowing what I was going to do, where I was going to transfer, just knowing that I have to get out of my house and I have to find a place that I can transfer to.” She continues, “At the time that I applied to TSI, I was basically at my breaking point.”
But the program provided a stipend and Villavizar Gomez met her current partner there. Soon she was able to move into Mercer’s Rider University housing program.
“It all lined up perfectly” she says.
After Villavizar Gomez moved to the Rider campus, she says she was free to continue on her collegiate journey in peace. She is now enrolled in another Princeton Program, the Teaching Transfer Initiative Program (TTI), taking Race and Labor, and is applying to a range of competitive colleges for transfer. She says she now has the opportunity to decide which path she wants to take next and how to go about it. “I’m incredibly stubborn,” she says. “I don’t like to quit.”
