For Jesus Camacho, attending UCI was an easy choice. The Irvine campus offered the political science senior the opportunity to stay close to home and work with his Santa Ana community through UCI’s Saturday Academy of Law and the Student Achievement Guided by Experience program. Camacho served as president of the latter, helping the program achieve its goal of 1000 hours of community service. He also participated in PREP, a summer program that gives Santa Ana parents an opportunity to experience university life through weekend dorm stays and participation in college-readiness workshops.

Camacho’s Santa Ana roots also fed his studies at UCI; under professors Ana Rosa and Louis DeSipio, he pursued research for his honors thesis on Orange County domestic workers and their families. He also studied the propensity of Latino permanent residents to naturalize, analyzing academic articles, newspapers, music and movies, creating surveys and conducting interviews for his research narratives.

He was awarded the Chancellor’s Award of Distinction and Order of Merit as a 2013 graduate. He was also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, Pi Sigma Alpha and the Golden Key International Honor Society. Camacho is the 2013 recipient of the School of Social Sciences Alumni Academic Excellence Scholarship.

He plans to attend law school and return to Orange County to work with underrepresented communities.