Duncan High graduate confronted her troubles. Now she’s aiming to become a veterinarian
Four years ago, Taylor Cruz felt she was forced by her guardians to attend Duncan Polytechnic High School. She wasn’t from the neighborhood and had no friends at all. She didn’t like the medical major.
It was a bumpy road. At one point, she ran away from home.
“I was very stubborn; I never took anybody’s advice; I like to do things in my own way, I didn’t care what other people had to say; I isolated from others,” says Cruz, now a thriving senior who just earned her nursing assistant certification and will soon be an undergraduate student at Fresno State.
Cruz struggled with family connections. Her mother passed away when she was eight years old, and her father left home two years later. Since then, Cruz has lived with her aunt, uncle and cousins, but she has never felt close to her relatives.
“My cousins have their dad and their mom, I wish my dad was here with me,” she recalls, tearing up as she remembers her upbringing. “I started comparing myself to everybody else’s life, because I didn’t have those… it must be nice to have that feeling.”
Cruz grew up witnessing her cousins have a good bond with their parents and siblings, and was confused by her father’s absence. The resentment and helplessness peaked during her sophomore year when she made poor decisions about friendships and relationships and blamed her family for everything.
“I ended up leaving my home and I was flipping from place to place for three weeks, I wasn’t stable anywhere,” she said. “I felt like everybody was against me – now I learned from it – but at the time I felt like they don’t love me.”
Upon returning home, she realized she could be in charge of her own life and began to grow mature after the heartbreak of splitting up with her boyfriend and spending her days and nights crying and ruminating alone.
Going to church, receiving positive feedback from her residency experience, and care from her teachers at Duncan High pulled her out of the mire, she says.
“When I started the medical, I didn’t like it at all, I was always in a bad mood,” says Cruz. “A resident at the facility spoke wisdom over me, and one day, she made me cry, she said ‘You will make it a really great nurse on how you care for us.’”
“It hit me really hard, I thought ‘OK, I may not want to do this, but I need to make these residents feel they’re still loved and still have people here to support them,’ that made me feel good as a person, so I started to enjoy it,” she continues.
Duncan’s teachers saw her transformation. One day, Principal Eric Martinez pulled Cruz to the side of the hallway and said he was proud of her changes.
“I thought nobody saw how much I changed and grew as a person, but hearing that from my own principal, oh wow, that was amazing,” Cruz says.
By frequenting church and a heads-down job, Cruz kept busy during the summer of her sophomore year and junior year. Slowly, she went back on the right track.
“I now understand everybody deals with certain griefs and stuff very differently, and some people are stronger than others. Before, I had a hard time forgiving and understanding that,” she says. “Now I feel strong, I pray about everything… I’m really grateful for what I have, academically I’m doing good, I have plans for the future.”
Cruz says keeping good grades has always been a priority for her. She says that her aunt and uncle were instrumental in establishing the idea that good grades would lead to a bright future. Cruz stuck to that attitude, including in subjects she didn’t like, no matter what she went through, and even at the time she didn’t care where she ended up in the future. A 3.4 GPA earned her acceptance to Fresno State.
Cruz hopes to major in veterinary, for which she will start by studying chemistry. Becoming a veterinarian has been her dream since she was a little girl.
“I just love animals, every time I see a herd or an animal that looks sad, I just want to hug them and take them home with me, I just want to help animals, that’s my dream,” she says, swinging between choosing the niches of wildlife or pet veterinary.
However, before going to school for veterinary, Cruz will be working as a CNA this summer and taking it as a part-time job during college. She’s excited about the possibilities of her prospective road.
“Everything I’m doing for CNA, I’ll do it for caring animals,” she says. “I’ll be learning about their body, what medications they would need if they have an injured arm or broken little limb.”
Ojo: The Latino student enrollment at Fresno State is 55.9%, according to California State University data.
This story was originally published June 4, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
