Propelled thirty stories in the air in the heart of Manhattan’s Financial District, I wondered, “do they not deserve the view?” I gazed off toward three massive uniform beige housing projects, mentally confronting this notion. I'd already heard so many versions of it at the leasing office where I worked at the time: “New York’s not for everybody.” Writing it off as an overgeneralization (a luxury building in the Financial District doesn’t even come close to representing all of New York City), I hadn’t truly considered its ramifications. When the prospective tenant, to whom I was showing the roof deck called the affordable housing buildings, which were obstructing our view of the Brooklyn Bridge, a waste, I knew he didn't mean to offend me. After all, he couldn't have expected me to be much different from him, standing there in my semi-business attire on the roof of the swank luxury apartment building.

But I was; I only had partial access to this world. Unlike those in the affordable housing projects, I’d had opportunities open to me that brought me to the leasing office. It was then that I remembered the fleeting moment when my father and I drove past his childhood home and he pointed out the windows of the small apartment in the Eastchester Gardens Housing Development of the Bronx. I am an observer, who is somewhere between the two starkly different realities. The diversity of people within my own life reminds me of the diversity of New York City, which I feel is something that needs to be protected.

The way that socioeconomic status impacts an individual’s opportunities, such as, education and housing began to especially unfold during the Fall semester of my sophomore year. A course I was taking called Anthropology of Race culminated in a lengthy research paper in which I compared the learning environments of an elementary school in the South Bronx and another in Port Washington, a historically affluent neighborhood on the North Shore of Long Island. I interviewed a teacher, who had taught at both schools, and found that the school in the Bronx received significantly less funding than the one in Port Washington. So the students, many of which had difficult situations at home, had the odds even more against them. Due to this, among other reasons, the students in the South Bronx did not perform as well. More subtle patterns also tend to get reinforced. Qualified teachers sometimes take jobs elsewhere, where the schools have more resources or are located in [better] neighborhoods, resulting in younger and less-qualified teachers being hired in these lower performing schools. It is a problem that widens the education gap even further, as well as, sustains a location-based distribution of opportunities in New York. Though socioeconomic classes may seem rigid, this is not to say that transcendence isn’t possible; Because, on some level, I know that I am an example of it.

The disparities between the classes are not always so pronounced. Being in Flushing, I never particularly felt hemmed into a rigid social class, as. I’d often find it funny when prospective tenants and would assume I was from Manhattan, knowing that when I told them I was from Flushing, a whole new picture of who I was, and where I came from popped into their head. The ability to sell myself as someone worth listening to and who is competent was something that allowed me to enter this world. When I join my brother and sister as First Generation College graduates this May, I will have transcended a barrier of my socioeconomic class, much as my father did, when he left the "Projects" behind.

The fact that opportunities and socioeconomic status often fall against racial lines is part of what has compelled me to volunteer as Outreach Coordinator for PreProBono, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that helps economically disadvantaged, underrepresented minority, and female pre-law students acquire and utilize law degrees for careers in public interest law. PreProBono’s cause of extending accessibility to pre-law education for underprivileged and underrepresented students immediately interested me; It was something that I could really identify with, as well as, something that I wanted to be a part of. As Outreach Coordinator I have been able to give back to a program that has served me.