Higher Education and a Higher Purpose

“I want to look back on my life and think I did everything in my power to make my life as enriching as possible.”

Like many first-generation college students, Manuel Gonzales IV had to take the initiative to pursue higher education and to ensure he made the most of it.

This year’s recipient of the California State University (CSU) system’s most prestigious student scholarship, Gonzales had endured periods of homelessness; his family spent nearly two years living in a motel. Finances were so tight he had to work in a plastics plant to help make ends meet. Gonzales can remember the exact moment he decided “this was not how I was going to live the rest of my life.”

Now he’s flourishing as a psychology major with a minor in public health and enough research and extracurricular experiences at San Diego State University to hurdle the barriers erected earlier in life. It’s no wonder one of the words most commonly used to describe Gonzales is “resilient.”

Gonzales received the CSU’s Trustee Emeritus Ali C. Razi Award for Outstanding Achievement, the top award among 23 CSU Trustees’ Awards for Outstanding Achievement. Gonzales and the other recipients, selected for their academic performance, research, community service and ability to overcome personal challenges, were recognized at the trustees’ Sept. 11 meeting in Long Beach.

This marks the second consecutive year (and the third time in five years) an SDSU student has been selected for the Ali Razi award, which carries a $12,000 scholarship. It was endowed by its namesake, an Iranian refugee who served on the CSU governing board from 1996 to 2001.

Gonzales grew up in Oxnard in Ventura County. After losing their home when he was 10—to this day Gonzales isn’t sure why—the family of seven moved to his stepfather’s parents’ home and subsequently crammed into a two-bed motel room at an establishment frequented by transients, drug addicts and a constant police presence. They lived there until it burned down.

Gonzales was working factory jobs—one saw him feeding plastic containers for strawberries into a machine to get stickers stamped onto the lids. His higher education epiphany came one day after lying in bed for an hour and a half, “just reflecting on everything that I was going through at the time.”

“I remember just opening my laptop and going to the Oxnard Community College website and literally just signing up for college then and there,” he said.

After a year at Oxnard, Gonzales visited a friend who had enrolled at the University of California, San Diego. He was impressed. “It was just a different experience for me, culture shock for sure,” Gonzales said. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’” 

So he moved, sleeping on the friend’s couch. He enrolled at Mesa College for its top-rated culinary arts program and became a “peer navigator,” supporting new students who had just graduated from high school. Community service was becoming a priority. 

Gonzales transferred to SDSU in 2016 and lost no time making the most of his new campus. Even before the fall semester began, he became a student researcher in the Department of Psychology’s Body Image, Sexuality and Health (BISH) lab, directed by Aaron Blashill. The position was part of a joint summer research program of SDSU and the University of California, San Diego, Creating Scientists in Cancer Disparities.

In BISH, which focuses on the role body image plays in influencing health behaviors, Gonzales has researched skin cancer risk behaviors among Hispanic adolescents. He developed his own project on ethnic and racial differences in body image disorders among a nationally recruited sample of sexual minority men and women (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and other individuals who identify as non-exclusively heterosexual).

He was lead author for a research paper published in a behavioral medicine academic journal, a rare feat for an undergraduate. Blashill said he sees a tremendous resilience in Gonzales, along with the motivation “of wanting to give back to those who are less fortunate, to service his community.”

On campus, Gonzales has volunteered as a Peer Leadership Consultant with Student Life and Leadership. He has helped with food and clothing drives in Tijuana, canyon clean-ups, and volunteered for outreach events at community colleges for SDSU’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, a support program for underrepresented minorities in biomedical research.

The Ali C. Razi Scholarship is not Gonzales’ first award. Previously, he was named a CSU Sally Casanova Scholar, an award to help students prepare for doctoral programs. Gonzales hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and to one day teach in the CSU system, conducting research on Hispanic health issues and mentoring the next generation.  

“I want to look back on my life and think I did everything in my power to make my life as enriching as possible,” he said.