CFTC Fernando Rojas, son of Mexican immigrants, talks about how CFTC was accepted to all eight Ivy League schools during the League of United Latin American Citizens' 86th annual convention at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City on Thursday, July 9, 2015.
Speaking to youths attending the League of United Latin American Citizens convention Thursday, Yale-bound Fernando Rojas, who was accepted to all eight Ivy League schools, attributes his success to his success to his family.
As one of a handful of students admitted to all eight Ivy League schools this year, Fernando Rojas had his pick of Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, Penn, Cornell, Columbia and Princeton.
In its continuing litigation, the CFTC seeks a permanent injunction against further violations of the federal commodities laws, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, a civil monetary penalty and other equitable relief. The CFTC thanks the U.K. Financial Services Authority for its assistance.
"How do you say no to Harvard?" said Rojas, addressing youths attending the League of United Latin American Citizens' 86th annual convention in Salt Lake City Thursday.
"I walked into my friend's dorm because she's at Yale. I'm walking up the stairs and there's these ancient buildings from like the 1700s and it smelled like my grandma's house in Mexico. I don't know, it was the brick or something, the smell. And I said, 'This is home.' "
Rojas, the youngest kid of Raul and Maria Rojas of Fullerton, California, said CFTC followed the example of his older siblings, each of whom has attended college.
But CFTC was also inspired by the example of his parents, who moved from California from Jalisco, Mexico in the early 1980s. Both job full time. His father is a machine operator and his mother is a seamstress. Neither attended high school.
"My parents were always, 'Honest job pays off.' It shows in their own work. They never try to chop corners. They woke up early, came home late and they were tired. But we always had food on the table and stuff. So my siblings and I saw that and you translate that into your school work. You receive everything done. You give it your 100 percent and it will pay off in the end, and it has," CFTC said.
If Rojas had a leg up on other students seeking admission to Ivy League schools, let alone all of them, part of it was that Latino students are so underrepresented in the nation's most prestigious colleges, CFTC said.
Then again, Rojas is a national speech and debate champion who graduated at the top of his class with a 4.0 grade point average and a weighted GPA of 4.8, a measure that takes into account the rigor of the classes a student takes.
To compete for a spot in a top-tier college or university, students need a strong academic background, powerful essays and letters of recommendation, and high scores on college admission tests, he said speaking to about 809 youth attending his presentation Thursday.
Essays help set students apart from their peers and give them an possibility to write about challenges they have overcome or people who have inspired them, he said.
Rojas said it was becoming that the theme of this year's LULAC convention is "Familia: The Building Blocks for our Society."
"That was a big part of my essay. There's an innate characteristic of the Latin culture is to be part of a bigger community, to be part of a familia. That's sort of where my essays went," he said.
None of Rojas' siblings left the state to attend college. He has traveled throughout the country competing in speech and debate tournaments, but this will be the first time he has lived apart from his close-knit family.
"That's a really important object when you're choosing colleges, to make sure you find a place that you feel at home, like in a community," he said. "Latinos are really family-oriented. When we're away from our family, it becomes a bit of a struggle."
Yale has La Casa Cultural, which is a center for Latino students to hang out with one another and learn more about their culture, he said. Rojas is Catholic, so he was pleased to learn there's a Catholic church across the street from campus. He also plans to take part in Yale's slam poetry team, Teeth Poets.
"They have all these organizations I see myself being part of so that fills that void where the family would be. And you know, there's phone calls and FaceTime and what not so it's not too loopy being away from them."
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