Lorena de Anda sips coffee in her cozy Palo Alto apartment while she prepares for another day with her patients. As a pediatric nurse at My Friends Pediatric Day Healthcare Center, De Anda spends her day offering medicare, helping families by improving the well-being of medically fragile children.

De Anda graduated from Paly in 2010, and looking back on her time at the school, she said she prioritized her social well-being in an academically rigorous environment.

“There was a lot of pressure to be really academically successful,” De Anda said. “The academics kind of came second (behind) socializing, but I still did well.”

De Anda said she never thought academics should define the high school experience and because of this, she said her plan was not to go to an expensive, private college, which helped ease her stress.

“It wasn’t a big stress in my day-to-day because I kind of had a plan for myself after high school, and community college was the plan,” De Anda said. “So I didn’t really stress so much about being the best or the top of my class.”

In addition to the competitive culture, De Anda also said cliques have been creating social rifts at Paly for a long time.

“It was like the haves and the have nots,” De Anda said. “It (was) a division between the wealthy students and the less wealthy students.”

This division caused many problems in De Anda’s life. Growing up in a low income household in Palo Alto, she said the city often felt intimidating, like a place where she didn’t quite belong.

“It was like this level that I was never going to reach, and I kind of internalized that,” De Anda said. “It took me going through college and pushing myself to get out of that mentality.”

De Anda said seeing the difference between her family’s financial situation and others at Paly made her feel uncertain when it eventually came to choosing healthcare as a career.

“I felt like I wasn’t really smart enough to go into it, and I didn’t learn how to study until I got to college,” De Anda said. “I had to prove to myself that I was smart enough to do it.”

In addition, it took her a long time to choose healthcare as a career path. De Anda said she was initially a psychology major in college.

“About a year and a half in, I was like, screw it,” De Anda said. “I need to do nursing. I can do it.”

However, the road to becoming a nurse wasn’t easy. De Anda said she discovered along the way that many who had succeeded in the field often had prior connections to smooth out the path.

“They have parents that are doctors; they have family members that are in health care that can help them get into those positions,” De Anda said. “All my family is low-income. They don’t have good jobs, so I didn’t have that help to get my foot in the door.”

Not only did she lack outside guidance, De Anda also said her financial situation made paying for school difficult.

“After I graduated from UC Santa Cruz, I took a three year gap where I just saved money to pay for nursing school, so I feel like that kind of also put me behind,” De Anda said. “Most people were going straight into nursing school after high school and four year programs, and I had to do my four year program, take a couple years off to work, and then get into nursing school.”

However, De Anda was still able to find resources that supported her including getting into a pre-health sorority.

We kind of helped keep each other accountable,” De Anda said. “That community encouraged me and pushed me to keep going.”

De Anda said if she had the opportunity to redo high school, she wouldn’t change anything.

“I liked my high school experience,” De Anda said. “I know that’s not true for a lot of people, but I liked my experience, and I like where my life is now.”

And De Anda said her story highlights many valuable lessons. She said one of them is that high schoolers shouldn’t measure themselves by other people’s expectations.

“I think there’s a lot of pressure to do well (at Paly) because there’s so many expectations from parents, from teachers and from society,” De Anda said. “But I think if you just focus on what you want to do and how you’re going to achieve your goals, you’ll be less stressed.”

At the end of the day, De Anda said having a fun high school experience should be a priority of students.

“Have a social life,” De Anda said. “Have a good time. Because if you’re just studying all day, your life is gonna be really boring.”