Christi Ferrer is the College & Career Advisor at Claremont International High School, where she previously worked as a College Bridge Coach. Christi graduated from Hunter Silberman School of Social Work in 2022 with a Bachelor’s in Social Work.
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When I graduated from [high school] they sent me this email and they were looking for college coaches. And I was always in the college office. So I was like, yes, this relates to me a lot because when I was a senior, I used to love being in the college office and helping out.
As a college coach, I was also doing internships in social work, and that’s when I started to realize that I love helping people. So I was like, let me just do some internships to see if I really like this. That’s one of the important things for us to explore, doing different internships that can take you where you really want to be.
[I work] in an international school where we need a lot of support towards undocumented students, and that’s one of the main things that CARA addresses, that we need to learn how to help everyone. There are many different resources for undocumented students and students who even want to go away. There are many opportunities that we need to learn…also for post-secondary options… We need to be learning about vocational programs in order to help all of the students case-by-case.That’s why I wanted to become a counselor. Because it has been an amazing experience with all of the training that I took at CARA, they really helped me a lot. We had all these great support systems, so it has been amazing. I’ve been improving in many things and now I’m ready to be the counselor. I want to be able to help everyone, no matter their diversity, no matter their immigration status.