Barbara Abreu Bicelis FP '27 (left) and Paula Mayorga '27 (right) enrolled at Mount Holyoke through the Kaplan Leadership Scholars program after earning their associate's degrees. Photo by Tara Monastesse '25.
By Tara Monastesse ’25
Editor-in-Chief
By the time Paula Mayorga ’27 and Barbara Abreu Bicelis FP ’27 set foot on Mount Holyoke’s campus for the first time last October for a tour, they had already become fast friends.
Both community college students had been hard at work looking for ways to further their education after receiving their associate degrees. Their pursuit had led them to apply to the Kaplan Leadership Program, an NYC-based program which seeks to enroll community college graduates from underrepresented communities into elite four-year colleges to receive their bachelor’s degrees. During their visit to campus in the fall of 2023, Mayorga and Bicelis were also touring some of the most elite colleges in the country alongside their fellow Kaplan scholars as they each prepared upwards of ten applications to transfer into a bachelor’s degree program.
Mayorga clearly recalls two things about their Mount Holyoke tour. One, that she had to remove her blazer on account of how unexpectedly hot it was that October day. Two: “We loved it.”
Paula Mayorga '27 (left) and Barbara Abreu Bicelis FP '27 (right). Photo by Tara Monastesse '25
This fall, the two friends are again taking the next step in their educational journeys together: this time as members of the class of 2027, after they both decided to matriculate at Mount Holyoke to pursue bachelor degrees. On the afternoon of Sept. 3, just hours after experiencing the fervor of Convocation for the first time, Mayorga and Bicelis sat down for an interview with Mount Holyoke News to discuss their educational journeys thus far and their plans for the future.
“One of the things that I love about Mount Holyoke is the community that you have here,” Bicelis said. A Venezuelan immigrant who arrived in the United States twelve years ago, Bicelis had attended a girls’ school in Venezuela when she was younger and found the sister-like support she received from her classmates invaluable. “I want to have a strong community of women that are going to be my sister,” Bicelis said. “They’re going to support me through the process. And that's the thing that I love about this school.”
“I’m a first-generation [student], so I never knew about the Seven Sisters historically women’s colleges,” Mayorga said. “When I came to Mount Holyoke … I fell in love. I really felt the community. I feel like I belong here.”
Mayorga, who recently graduated with an associate degree in criminal justice from Hudson County Community College, is looking to pursue an international relations major with a potential minor in Latinx studies or Spanish. Her primary area of career interest is immigration, as she hopes to support immigration reform in the United States and make higher education more accessible to new immigrants. To that end, she sees law school on the horizon.
Having relocated to the United States from Ecuador five years ago, Mayorga said that her personal experience with the American immigration system has fueled her career passion.
“I was afraid to go to a four-year university,” Mayorga said. “I did not have the right guidance and the confidence.”
“[Kaplan] helped me to embrace my internal voice and also helped me to actually dream big, like things I never thought I would be capable of … I never thought I would be able to come to such an intellectual environment and feel that I belong here, and I earned it.”
Meanwhile, Bicelis is looking to pursue a career on Wall Street as either a financial analyst or an investment banker after finishing her studies. A graduate of Borough of Manhattan Community College with an associate degree in business administration, Bicelis is now majoring in economics and exploring other options such as a politics minor. She plans to use her career in business to search for ways to provide economic support to financially struggling countries in the Americas, including Venezuela.
“You don’t need to do a lot of things to change the world,” Bicelis said; rather, she believes it is important to focus on working “one-by-one” with the people around her. “That’s the force that drives me to be a better person, that’s the force that drives me to go back to school, even if I’m 29 years old, because I know if I go to school, my little cousins can feel motivated … My sister, she’s thinking to go back to college right now because of me.”
Bicelis stated that she views finance as a gateway for opportunity, hoping that through her work she will be able to support individuals, such as artists, who need funding to pursue their own dreams.
Both Mayorga and Bicelis cited the support of the Kaplan Educational Foundation as being indispensable to their pursuit of higher education. In addition to receiving personalized assistance during the transfer application process, Kaplan Leadership Program scholars are also given access to a variety of resources to support their higher education journey. According to Bicelis, she was able to take courses to improve her English language skills with support from the Kaplan Educational Foundation. She was also able to rent a car in order to transport her belongings to the College during move-in.
Bicelis’ advice to other community college graduates looking to continue their education is to be unafraid to ask for help.
“If I can do it, they can do it,” she said.
Karishma Ramkarran ’27 contributed fact-checking.
CORRECTION 9/16/2024: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Mayorga is a graduate of Borough of Manhattan Community College. She is actually a graduate of Hudson County Community College. Additionally, an anecdote about renting a car with support from the Kaplan Educational Foundation was misattributed to Mayorga; this story was actually told by Bicelis.