My name is Bryan Zuniga, and I am honored to introduce myself as the PROPEL Program Director within UC Santa Barbara’s Division of Social Sciences, as of March 2025. I walked the same campus as a first-generation Promise Scholar less than a handful of years ago— and like many of our scholars, my frame of reference for higher education was always beyond who and what was familiar to me. Also coming from an under-resourced, low-income background, I’m extremely grateful to help PROPEL scholars, who share similar stories, aspire on their own terms and make the most of what UCSB has to offer.