In an effort to show Diamond Bar High School students a glimpse of their academic futures, USB presented an alumni Q&A event Sept. 7-16.

“USB reached out to alumni they had connections to. Some were friends, some were siblings. A few of the [alumni] were USB students from prior years,” USB advisor Janna Van Horn said via email. 

Among the college students who took part in the event were Arella Yang, Cami Kuruma, Hampton Douglas, Lawrence Wang, Jennifer Nie, Jeremiah Chukwudobe, Carissa Martinez and Katherine Tran. 

Each participant took over the USB Instagram page for a day, posting short video responses to the page’s Instagram Story, answering students’ questions regarding college throughout the day.

Class of 2019 alumnus Chukwudobe plays football at UC Davis and is planning to attend law school.

“I chose to attend so I can give DB students the knowledge I have not and to also show the athletes at DBHS that they can make it D1 [NCAA’s Division I] to wherever they want to go,” Chuwudobe said via Instagram. “I’m still studying to be a lawyer while here at Davis and I’ll still apply for law school but if I get drafted first then I’ll finish law school later.”

Tran is a UCI student majoring in language science and is also a part of USC’s reserve officers’ training corps. The ROTC is a college-based program for training officers of the U.S. armed forces.

“My Air Force scholarship not only covers all four years of my tuition, but I also get a monthly stipend,” Tran said. “ROTC allows me to be a college student while training to be an Air Force officer.”

For the most part, students’ questions revolved around college life and applications. With a wide variety of alumni, students said that they had access to a diverse pool of knowledge on many niche topics relating to certain schools and majors.

“It was really insightful to see people who already have experience talk about it and give tips. I thought it was really useful and the event answered a lot of questions I didn’t even know [I] had,” Laura Zhang said via Instagram.

According to Van Horn, USB is working on many projects; however, they may decide to revisit this activity again, depending on how engaged the student body was. 

“I think this event was more successful than they expected.  We never know how activities will be [received],” Van Horn said. “It is up to USB to come up with different events that might engage our student body. I think that alumni that spoke offered real world perspectives and were [relatable] to our students.”