Rooted in Agency: Aaliyah Balangue ’21

On a sun-bleached afternoon in Pasadena, Aaliyah Balangue ‘21 remembers the weight of her first backpacking trip: a pack nearly the size of her torso pressing into her shoulders as she trudged through Utah dust. “Fifty, seventy-five pounds,” she laughs. “The first day was the hardest—bugs, tired feet, no showers or bathrooms. But then you find this rhythm. You start struggling together, and the struggle itself becomes beautiful.”

That memory, she says, is Sequoyah School in miniature: not grades or transcripts, but the practice of learning how to carry weight—together.

At UC Santa Cruz, she quickly noticed how differently her peers approached professors, many treating them like distant oracles. She had no such hesitation. “Sequoyah encouraged us to connect with our teachers, to go to office hours,” she says. “So in college, it was easy for me to ask for advice or support. That made a huge difference.” Talking Leaves had already trained her to write and revise long papers, then distill them into something clear and persuasive. By the time she hit lecture halls, she carried stamina—and a voice.

Her passion for science also deepened at Sequoyah. Through the STEM Institute, she learned to read peer-reviewed articles, draft hypotheses, and reach out to experts: “It wasn’t a club—it was a portal.” The skills made college labs feel like familiar ground; grants and fellowships soon followed.

If there is one word she returns to, it is agency. At Sequoyah, she founded Girls Who STEM, co-led the Latinx Culture Club, designed and taught her own class, and worked with migrant and refugee communities through the school’s Social Innovation Program (SIP). “I had control over my learning,” she says. “I could dream up something and make it real. That’s still what I carry with me.”

Teachers gave that agency form. She still recalls touring science classrooms at Sequoyah’s high school campus, a lesson so alive it made physics look like play. Later, her teachers asked her to lead a project—an early taste of leadership and accountability.

“I still have the Project Leader tag,” Aaliyah grins.

Field Studies expanded the horizon further. In Costa Rica, she lived with a host family and spoke Spanish not from a textbook but around dinner tables. With Nicaraguan roots of her own, the connection felt intimate. “We cried when we left,” she says. “I stayed in touch because it meant so much.”

College brought new challenges. As the first in her family to attend, she felt the ache of impostor syndrome. But fellow first-generation students, many of them Sequoyah peers, became her anchors. Sean Hamidi, her high school advisor, remained a lifeline. Over time, belonging stopped feeling borrowed.

Now a recent graduate with degrees in Global Community Health and Feminist Studies, she traces a clear line back to Sequoyah. SIP projects that first connected her with asylum-seeking families and survivors of domestic violence inspired her commitment to public health. Her humanities classes exposed the legacies of genocide and colonialism—the histories that shape inequities she studies today. “Sequoyah,” she says simply, “was the root.”

Having crossed the Santa Cruz stage in June, Aaliyah looks ahead to jobs in Los Angeles public health, a PhD, and a peer-mentoring program for first-generation students. She is already co-authoring research on maternal stress and child health, with publication on the horizon.

Listening to her, one imagines Sequoyah less as a place she left than as a spirit she carries forward: a model of community, a reminder that the hardest journeys—like that pack in Utah—become bearable, even beautiful, once the weight is shared.