Sergio Rosas

Sergio Rosas, ’09, MA ’18, grew up in the Coachella Valley in Southern California, the oldest son of Mexican immigrants. Desert life was isolated, and money was in short supply across the social and educational infrastructure; it could be hard for a young person to imagine a different place and way of being. (“What’s a programmer when all you know is what your father, a gardener, does?” Rosas says.) But his parents, Hilda and Simon—loving, supportive and sometimes strict—emphasized education as a pathway to a better life, and Rosas found himself at Stanford as an undergraduate, the first in his family to attend college. Now a master’s student in the Learning, Design and Technology (LDT) program at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, his goal is to do for others what his parents and mentors did for him, but at the systems level: help organizations and companies build bridges to greater economic opportunity through education, skills development, job training and technology. The drive on the part of students, Rosas says, is already there.