Transfer route provides second chance

It’s not often someone gets a second chance at her dreams.

Tina Oh’s rejection from UCLA as a high school applicant was an event that intensified her academic focus and challenged her faith.

Oh immersed herself in UCLA campus life through the dancing and Christian communities, though she attends school across town at Santa Monica College.

Forty percent of students in UCLA’s graduating class are transfer students. Oh joined the ranks of transfer students when she applied and was accepted to UCLA to start in the Fall of 2009.

“When I got the e-mail, me and my mom were screaming for 10 minutes straight,” she said about when she received the news of her recent acceptance to UCLA.

Oh said she received strong support from her family and friends on her transition to UCLA.

The Orange County native never thought she would go to community college. To get as much of a first-year college experience as possible, she lived with a roommate in an urban environment.

A friend introduced her to a freshman spiritual accountability meeting sponsored by Korean-American Campus Mission, which got her on the UCLA campus every week and transformed her life as she entered a phase of spiritual doubt caused by her curricula.

Though Santa Monica College was an unexpected detour, Oh said she is not bitter about it. She said she enjoyed the small class sizes and personal attention from her professors ““ yet she insists a large research university is the place for her.

“Walking down Bruin Walk is really fun ““ so much going on and so much spirit,” she said.

The relationships Oh has fostered for two years with people at UCLA will allow her to focus on academics and not the frenzy of making friends, she said.

“(Oh’s) way more involved with school than I am,” said Jiyeon Seo a second-year physiological science student who has known Oh since junior high.

For the past two years, Oh has taken part in the Association of Chinese Americans Hip Hop dance team, the Christian group Korean-American Campus Mission, and a job in food services.

“I didn’t know about science. My very liberal teachers hated Christianity. “˜God? What’s that? That’s crap.’ … I didn’t know if I believed in God,” Oh said of her experience during her first year in community college.

Her new friends at the spiritual accountability meetings at UCLA kept Oh on track by asking her how her “walk with God was going” in an attempt to resolve her doubts about God and science’s place in religion.

Oh plans to pursue her interest in personal relationships by studying psychology, a field where she hopes to apply her knowledge of faith.

“She knows what she wants. Academics are more a priority,” said Ruth Chun, a second-year comparative literature student, on the newfound sense of focus she says she has witnessed in her childhood friend.

Although Oh recognized that she has grown in her two years at Santa Monica College, she expressed anxiety on competing with her freshman-admitted peers at UCLA.

“I’m so nervous, you don’t even understand! I’m freaking scared. I don’t know what to expect,” she said.

Oh acknowledged the difficultly of staying focused on transferring to UCLA in two years while she was at Santa Monica College.

This is a challenge faced by Oh and her community college peers, especially as financial straits deepen.

“A lot of UC students are coming to SMC because they couldn’t afford the tuition at the UCs. … It’s very easy to fall out and not go to school,” she said.

Oh said that after her faith was restored, she made the necessary changes to optimize her success at UCLA.

“Reality set in. In high school, you think you can have whatever you want. Going through rough times, having dreams crushed, … you still have to have optimism.”