Meet some of our terrific students: Malia Ramos

Communication/Urban Studies

Next Step Scholarship recipient

As a young housewife and mother of three, Malia Ramos worked countless minimum-wage jobs. Although she had done well in high school, she had dropped out in her senior year and thought that education was a path that was closed to her.

Then she began taking care of her husband’s terminally ill grandmother. She encouraged Malia to go back to school, telling about her own education at Stanford University. When she died, Malia earned her GED and enrolled at Tacoma Community College.

“I began to find myself excited about my education,” she said. “While immersed in a whole new world of knowledge, I found a skill within myself that I had never realized I had before.”

Malia’s strong writing skills helped her, and she began to enjoy analyzing and interpreting stories from her community. She joined the online student news staff and wrote articles on diversity issues correlated to special events on campus.

She received a Next Step scholarship and is now a junior at UW Tacoma, majoring in urban studies and communication.

“My ideal career would be a community relations officer position for an organization like the Tacoma Urban League or the NAACP,” she said. “By studying communications and urban studies at UW Tacoma, I hope to develop my skills in writing for the public, as well as gain additional knowledge of different approaches to community issues.”