Byron Chamorro first arrived at CARA in the fall of 2015 as part of our first cohort of year-round Bridge Coaches. He continued coaching for his high school, the Expeditionary School for Community Leaders, for 3 years, and then moved on to coach at another high school. Since 2019, he has also served as CARA’s graphic designer, doing everything from creating report and curriculum designs, to managing our website, to creating these monthly Eblasts. He also works for other organizations as a freelance designer and will receive a bachelor’s of fine arts in Graphic Design from New York City College of Technology in May of 2023.
How did you become a Bridge Coach?
I was struggling a lot with financial aid and at one point I was just giving up on continuing to enroll in college. So my counselor, she saw the determination that I had and, you know, everything that was going on and that I needed a job also.
I didn’t used to be someone that could talk to a group of people and be comfortable. I knew that the job would require me to lead workshops, and talk to students, explain things, things like that. So I saw it as an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and I said yes.
What do you learn from being a Bridge Coach?
I managed to connect [well] with students given my age, being close in age. But it also presented a lot of challenges with communication, leadership, and self-advocacy. Communicating, getting my thoughts out, was very difficult for me. So explaining things, walking people through a process was not possible at all [before]. Doing this job for six years definitely helped with that.
So learning about those things during trainings and from personal experience, connecting those actually helped me a lot with walking into an office or calling the financial aid office and saying, ‘hey, my financial aid is not going through’, which I wouldn’t have been able to – or have the guts to – stand up for myself and do those things if it wasn’t because of coaching.
How did you end up studying graphic design?
I spoke to my guidance counselors saying I’m interested in art, math and coding and stuff like that. What can I do with this? And they mentioned graphic design, I looked into it and it was something that kind of combined a lot of the things that I was interested in.
What do you picture yourself doing once you finish your degree?
I don’t want to just settle on graphic design. I want to do it in a fun way that at the same time helps others. I’m passionate about that. That is the reason why I did [Bridge] coaching for six years, because I want to give back to the community and schools. So I want to take my design skills and everything that I know about design and focus it on doing things that…are meaningful. I realized that my coaching experience and design are connected: I want to focus on creating content and products that [will] help students achieve or access higher education.