Alumni Advice to the Next Generation

Over forty years, a lot of kids have come through these rooms and then walked back out into the world. Some are in college now, a dozen of them on Hope Horizon scholarships this year. Some are working, some are raising their own children, some drift back through on a Tuesday just to say hello and end up staying to help. When you ask them what they wish they had known earlier, the answers are less varied than you would expect. Different kids, different roads, and yet the advice rhymes. We have collected the through-lines here, illustrated with composite students who stand in for the many, not any one real person.

"Ask for help before you are drowning, not after."

The first thing almost everyone says, in one form or another, is that they waited too long to ask for help. A kid who cannot read a passage learns early to go quiet and look busy. A teenager who does not understand a math unit learns to nod. The instinct to hide a struggle is nearly universal, and it is almost always the wrong one.

Think of a composite student, call her Marisol, who spent most of ninth grade convinced that everyone around her understood chemistry and she alone did not. She was wrong, of course. Half the class was faking it too. But the belief kept her from raising her hand, and the small gaps became large ones by June. What turned it around was not a tutoring miracle. It was a mentor who noticed the pattern and said, plainly, that asking a question is not a confession of weakness, it is the single most efficient thing a smart person does. Marisol started asking. Her grades were the last thing to change; her shoulders were the first.

The alumni who look back on that lesson tend to phrase it as a gift they wish they had unwrapped sooner. Help was there. The pride was the obstacle, not the shortage.

"Find one adult who is genuinely in your corner, and keep them close."

If there is a single piece of advice that appears in nearly every conversation, it is this one. Not a whole village of supporters, though that is nice. One reliable adult who knows your name, knows your situation, and does not go anywhere when things get hard.

The research backs up what our alumni feel in their bones. MENTOR, the national mentoring organization, found that 76 percent of at-risk young adults who had a mentor aspired to enroll in and graduate from college, compared with 56 percent of those without one. The same body of work estimates that about one in three young people reach adulthood without ever having a mentor. The Search Institute, which has studied youth development for decades, describes a small set of "developmental relationships" that help young people grow, built on things like expressing care, challenging growth, and expanding the sense of what is possible. None of that requires a title or a degree. It requires showing up, again and again, until a kid believes you mean it.

Nobody in this list of advice says they made it alone. The self-made story is a myth even the successful ones refuse to tell.

"Apply anyway. You will feel unqualified. Do it scared."

A striking number of our alumni describe a moment when they almost did not apply for something, a scholarship, a program, a job, a college, because they were sure they did not measure up. The ones who applied anyway are unanimous: the fear was not information. It was just fear.

This lands especially hard for first-generation students, who make up roughly a third of all undergraduates nationally and who often complete college at lower rates, partly because nobody at home has walked the road before them. When you are the first, every step is unmarked. There is no older sibling who already decoded the financial aid form, no parent who can explain what office hours are for. That absence is not a character flaw in the family. It is simply a map nobody was handed.

Which is exactly where a mentor earns their keep. A composite student named Andre almost skipped a scholarship application because the essay asked him to describe his "leadership experience," and he was certain he had none. A mentor sat with him and helped him see that translating for his mother at the doctor's office, and keeping his younger cousins on track with homework, was leadership by any honest definition. He applied. That is the pattern our alumni describe over and over: the qualification was already there, and someone older just helped them see it and name it.

"Where you start is real. It is not where you end."

Our alumni are not naive about the odds, because they lived them. East Palo Alto sits in the shadow of some of the wealthiest companies on earth, and the gap is not abstract. In the local Ravenswood City Elementary School District, during the 2024-25 school year, about 12 percent of students scored proficient or above in English on the state test, against roughly 49 percent statewide. Nine in ten students in the district come from low-income families. The young people who grew up here know exactly what those numbers describe, because they were once inside them.

And yet the advice they pass down refuses to end there. A hard start is real, they say, but it is a starting line, not a ceiling. The kids who make it are not the ones who were handed the least resistance. They are the ones who found a few steady people, asked for help, and kept walking. The starting point was a fact about their circumstances, never a verdict on their future.

"Come back. Someone behind you is exactly where you were."

The last piece of advice is the one that closes the loop, and it is the reason articles like this one exist. Many of the young people who grow up in a place like this come back to give what they got. Some volunteer. Some mentor. Some join the staff. They come back because they remember, with unusual clarity, the adult who made the difference for them, and they want to be that for someone else.

That is the quiet engine underneath all of it. Advice is nice, but advice does not raise a child. A person does. Every lesson in this article, from asking for help to applying scared, reached these young people through somebody who was simply, reliably, there.

Which means the most useful thing you can do with this article is not to memorize the advice. It is to become the person who delivers it, in a hundred small unglamorous moments, to a kid three miles away who is waiting for exactly that.

Common questions

What advice do Hope Horizon alumni give younger students?

The same themes come up again and again: ask for help early instead of hiding a struggle, keep at least one steady adult close, apply for things even when you feel unqualified, and remember that a hard start is not a small future. Almost all of it traces back to having someone in their corner.

Why does having a mentor matter so much for first-generation students?

First-generation students are navigating college and career without a family roadmap. They make up roughly a third of undergraduates nationally and complete at lower rates. A mentor fills in the parts nobody at home has seen before, from a financial aid form to how to email a professor.

Does mentoring actually change outcomes for young people?

Research from MENTOR found that 76% of at-risk young adults who had a mentor aspired to enroll in and graduate from college, compared with 56% of those without one. About one in three young people grow up without a mentor at all.

How can I become a mentor to a student in East Palo Alto?

You don't need special credentials. Hope Horizon trains and supports mentors and matches you with a student in East Palo Alto. Consistency matters more than expertise: showing up weekly is the whole job.