Most mortals concede the limits of Earth’s 24-hour spin and yearly lap around the Sun, but Leily Garcia has defied both on her way to today’s 2021 Hartnell College Commencement, on May 21.
Just 16 years old, Garcia has earned four Hartnell degrees and this fall will enter the University of California, Los Angeles at roughly a mid-sophomore level. She plans to study biology and continue on to medical school.
Not incidentally, this first-generation college student also will receive a diploma on June 12 as the youngest member of the Soledad High School class of ’21, with a weighted GPA of 4.6. Her Hartnell GPA is 3.8, earning her summa cum laude honors.
Garcia has leveraged her work ethic and determination through Hartnell’s concurrent and dual enrollment programs, which allow students to earn college credits in their spare time and while taking high school courses. Both of those opportunities are absolutely free for students and their families.
Along the way, she has even found time to be a teenager.
“I was still able to go out with friends,” Garcia said. “I still had time to relax. I still had time to spend with my pets. I would watch TV shows. I would sleep in during the weekends. There were some sacrifices I had to make, some changes I had to make maybe, but I wouldn’t say I didn’t have the normal high school experience. I would say instead I used my time wisely.”
She competed for Soledad in cross country and swimming, played clarinet in the marching band and was president of the D.I.Y. club, whose members found pandemic relief in such activities as making tie-dyed shirts. On weekends, she sometimes helped serve meals to the homeless at the Victory Mission in Salinas.
Among several Hartnell graduation speakers
Garcia will share her experiences as one of several graduate speakers during Hartnell’s May 21 Commencement, a virtual ceremony that will be streamed online for graduates to savor with family and friends. On May 28, the grads are invited to the Main Campus in Salinas to be for an in-person recognition ceremony and photos with college leaders.
Garcia’s four associate degrees from Hartnell are in Spanish plus three separate areas of emphasis in Liberal Arts: Culture and Society, Humanities and Languages and Literature. She also has completed the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum (IGETC), a series of courses that California community college students can complete to satisfy freshman/sophomore level general education requirements before transferring to most colleges and majors at UC campuses.
She gives ample credit to the Upward Bound summer residential program at Cal State Monterey Bay, where she earned CSUMB and Monterey Peninsula College credit and was able to tour all the UC campuses in Southern California. All told, she has 85 college credits, including some from Gavilan College.
Garcia also credits the encouragement of her immigrant parents, Maria Elena Garcia and Alfredo Garcia, and the example of her older brother, who likewise earned a Hartnell degree while in high school. The family has especially felt the impact of the pandemic while caring for her older sister, who has special needs and is immunocompromised due to an illness.
Years have sharpened her motivation
Garcia said that when she began taking courses at Hartnell’s King City Education Center during the summer after eighth grade, independence was her primary motivation.
“It was fun,” she said. “I met new people. I learned new things. I went new places. I was by myself, which gave an opportunity to be independent, and I think that was the feeling that I pursued in the beginning — being independent, being able to be myself without any supervision, technically no supervision from my parents.”
But over time, Garcia began to focus more on her long-term goal of becoming an anesthesiologist and how she could accelerate the typical 12-year path to that high-stakes career. This from a young woman who was able to skip kindergarten after two years of preschool.
“I wanted to become a doctor in the shortest time possible,” she said. “I wanted to help people sooner.”
Garcia said neither the older students in her Hartnell classes nor her instructors ever made her feel uncomfortable or cut her any slack because of her age.
“I felt proud because I was able to keep up with them and was given the same treatment and everything — the same homework,” she said. “We studied together. We were able to go through the same things together.”
While taking afternoon and weekend courses at Hartnell’s King City center and on the Main Campus in Salinas, as well as some online, she also began taking dual enrollment courses as a Soledad High sophomore. Garcia said she “100% recommends” that students take full advantage of that opportunity.
Even this summer, she won't exactly ease up. On top of her job at Starbucks, she plans to pick up a few more credits at Hartnell before starting at UCLA.
“I’m going to take a couple — calculus and chemistry — that are undergraduate requirements at UCLA,” Garcia said. “I thought I could get the classes out of the way.”
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