Isela Sosa Mendoza is an aspiring biomedical engineer with a gift for math. She is now pursuing a PhD at UC Davis, focused on prosthetics and robotics—designing technology to improve people’s lives.
When Isela first enrolled in 2018, her goal was simply to learn English. She had arrived from El Salvador years earlier and had been cleaning houses since the day she came to this country.
A counselor noticed Isela tested remarkably well in math—despite fourteen years away from any classroom—and urged her to pursue it. So she did, attending classes by day and cleaning houses at night, shuttling her two kids to soccer and piano, and finding hours to study in between. Her daughter was six and her son was nine when she started. “The system is not made for us,” Isela says. “So we have to work around everything in order to make it work.”
Then a woodworking accident sent a splinter through her middle finger. The emergency room visit took six hours and left her with a $10,000 bill. She had no insurance. The Foundation helped her pay it down—keeping a medical crisis from becoming the reason she stopped.
