Ricardo Padilla and his wife, Cindy Padilla, his high school sweetheart and also a CSUF graduate, along with their baby girl, Cadence Padilla. Padilla credits his wife, an ICU nurse at UCLA, with supporting the family financially while he goes through medical school.
But once he began taking classes in the Department of Kinesiology at Cal State, faculty and advisers began to encourage Padilla to set his academic sights higher.
That encouragement ultimately led Padilla to earn not only a bachelor’s degree in Athletic Training and a master’s degree in Kinesiology from Cal State Fullerton, but it helped him land a full-tuition scholarship as a medical student at the Keck School of Medicine at The University of Southern California (USC).
Padilla, 27, credits his experience at Cal State Fullerton with prompting him to take his academic and professional pursuits to a level that he had not previously envisioned.
“I had no idea I wanted to go into medicine,” Padilla told Diverse. “What they did for me was really just sort of take me from a very mediocre student to a student that was really able to excel.”
Padilla’s experience at Cal State Fullerton is just one of many stories behind Cal State Fullerton’s distinction as a top degree-granting institution for Latinos studying to enter the health profession.
According to a recent report from Excelenica, a research and policy organization that focuses on Latino college completion, Cal State Fullerton is one of the top 25 institutions where Latinos earned bachelor’s degrees in health in 2012-13.
