{"id":1214,"date":"2010-07-20T15:08:13","date_gmt":"2010-07-20T19:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/?p=1214"},"modified":"2023-02-02T15:59:20","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T20:59:20","slug":"the-best-example","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/2010\/the-best-example\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Example"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Omar

Omar Gutierrez, a junior majoring in health science anthropology, began doing volunteer work through the Center for Civic Engagement and Learning during his freshman year. Photo by Daniel Milner.<\/p><\/div>\n

On an evening in late September, cloudy but not yet dark, two young men with book bags dangling from their shoulders arrived at Esperanza, an educational nonprofit on Cleveland\u2019s West Side. At that hour, they could have been eating dinner with their families or hanging out with friends. But instead, they sat down across from each other at a small conference table and started their homework. One of them took notes on a history essay filled with unfamiliar words and phrases: divination, de facto, forensic. <\/em>The other tackled math problems in an SAT prep book the size of a telephone directory.<\/p>\n

A tutor wearing a Case Western Reserve University t-shirt was already at the table when they came in. He, too, could have been doing other things that evening, but he didn\u2019t seem to be thinking about them. As he answered the students\u2019 questions and asked a few of his own, he gave the impression that he had all the time in the world.<\/p>\n

Although the young men had never worked with him before, they were clearly at ease in his presence. Before the session ended, he made sure he knew their names and that they knew his.<\/p>\n

Omar Gutierrez <\/strong>has been volunteering at Esperanza since the spring of his freshman year. Several students he first met when they were high school sophomores or juniors have graduated and gone on to college, thanks in part to his involvement in their lives.<\/p>\n

“I love having the interaction with students,\u201d Gutierrez says. \u201cI talk with them about my experiences with my education, and how I ended up where I am.\u201d Like many of these students, Gutierrez grew up in an immigrant family in an inner-city neighborhood. And he struggled with the same challenges\u2014a language barrier, peer pressure, a scarcity of educational role models\u2014that Esperanza seeks to address with its programs for the city\u2019s Hispanic youth.<\/p>\n

Mentors like Gutierrez have a powerful impact on their \u201cnear peers,\u201d says Victor Ruiz, the organization\u2019s executive director. \u201cThey can say to them: You know what? I\u2019m doing it; you can, too.<\/em>\u201d It\u2019s a message Gutierrez conveys even to students who may not know the full extent of his achievements.<\/p>\n

Countless Hours<\/h3>\n
\"Twice

Twice a week, Gutierrez works with high school students in a leadership development program at Esperanza. Top, from left: Ariana Latimer, Kayla Mendez, Angelica Southwick, Yadira Cortes, India Eaton, Omar Gutierrez, Victor Ruiz Jr., Digna Lewis, Jennifer Sanchez, Eliza Semidei. Bottom, from left: Arelis Latimer, Jean Caraballo, Erica Rivera, Kiara Kuratomi, Rafael Jose Castro. Photo by Daniel Milner.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2008, as he was about to graduate from a magnet high school in Dayton, Ohio, Gutierrez was awarded a Gates Millennium Scholarship to attend the university of his choice. The scholarship covers the entire cost of his undergraduate education and would carry him through to a doctorate if he wanted one. (At this point, though, he is planning on a medical degree instead.) When he enrolled at Case Western Reserve, he worried about \u201ccoming into college from an inner-city school and being unprepared for the level of work that you suddenly get thrust into.\u201d But Gutierrez proved himself academically by the end of his first semester, and this year he received a \u201c3.5 and Up\u201d award from the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA), which honored him at its 2010 Unity Banquet.<\/p>\n

Since declaring a major in health science anthropology, Gutierrez has engaged in biomedical and social science research addressing health disparities within the United States and around the world. In addition, he has devoted countless hours to organizations and initiatives across the university. When the Office of Undergraduate Admission hosts events to recruit students from underrepresented minorities, Gutierrez steps to the microphone. He has planned cultural and community service activities for the student group La Alianza, and he has assumed a leadership role in virtually every service program conducted by the Center for Civic Engagement and Learning (CCEL). Last May, in recognition of his \u201csignificant contributions to campus life, scholarship and community service,\u201d he received OMA\u2019s Stephanie Tubbs Jones Award.<\/p>\n

Even Gutierrez\u2019s friends and supervisors do not claim to know everything he is involved in. \u201cOmar doesn\u2019t broadcast what he does,\u201d says Angela Lowery, CCEL\u2019s student service coordinator. She recalls a conversation with a colleague in the admission office: \u201cSomehow, Omar\u2019s name came up, and she said, \u2018Oh, he helps us so much with our diversity panels.\u201d And I thought, \u2018He\u2019s never mentioned any of that to me!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s one of those people who is always there for us,\u201d Lowery adds. \u201cMany times we have last-minute situations come up, a need for a student representative to go request funding for a program of ours, and he is always willing and able to do that. It\u2019s mysterious to me; I don\u2019t know how he manages to find the time. He is the best example we have of a student who got engaged early on and has stayed connected on all kinds of levels. He\u2019s really one of our models.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Cascade of Events<\/h3>\n

Gutierrez has lived in the United States since he was seven years old. Born in Mexico City, he came to this country with his parents and two older siblings, joining relatives who had already settled in Ohio. Two months after his arrival, he started kindergarten along with a cousin who had been born in the United States. Unlike Gutierrez, she was fluent in English as well as in Spanish.<\/p>\n

\"Gutierrez

Gutierrez was honored for academic excellence at this year’s Unity Banquet, sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs. Photo by Eric Benson.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI remember going to class and not knowing what anybody was saying; it was like hearing all these noises,\u201d Gutierrez says. \u201cAnd we felt really alone, because we were the only two non-American students, period\u2014there were no other foreign students in the class. Kids would pick on me because I couldn\u2019t speak English. By the time the school year was over, I must have been a little traumatized, because I was scared to speak Spanish in front of anybody who wasn\u2019t Mexican. I didn\u2019t even say<\/em> I was Mexican.\u201d<\/p>\n

That summer, Gutierrez was determined to learn English. \u201cI remember going around and refusing to speak Spanish to anybody, and using the little bit of English that I knew,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI picked up a lot from my cousins. The next year, I ended up getting the highest grades in the class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Gutierrez says, it took years to overcome his fear of being seen as non-American. \u201cWe had other Mexican students come into our school who were in the same position that I was in before,\u201d he says. \u201cThe teacher would know that I knew how to speak Spanish, and she would try to match us up. But I would do everything to avoid it. That\u2019s kind of sad, now that I think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time he reached middle school, Gutierrez was no longer at the top of his class. \u201cI had a hard time maintaining my schoolwork,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI was very unfocused; I was hanging around with the wrong people. But eventually, around my junior year of high school, there was a cascade of events that led me to contemplate: \u2018What am I doing with my life? And what is really important to me?\u2019 I actually started looking ahead to college, and I worked really hard to get myself prepared to make that transition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gutierrez was aided in his efforts by a parishioner at his church. Yvette Kelly-Fields, director of development for the Dayton Urban League, stepped forward and became his mentor. \u201cShe made me a binder with a list of things I should think about\u2014financial aid, schools I should start researching, what majors interested me,\u201d Gutierrez says. \u201cWe sat down once a week, looked online and picked out scholarships that I could get. And at the top of the list was the Gates Millennium Scholarship, because it was the biggest and the one that could help me go to some other place. I was looking to go somewhere else, somewhere far from the city, and that scholarship would give me the ability to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and administered by the United Negro College Fund, the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program makes awards to 1,000 minority students nationally each year. Candidates must demonstrate not only academic excellence, but also dedication to community service. So Kelly-Fields connected Gutierrez with the Urban League\u2019s tutoring program, where he began volunteering two or three days a week.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kept putting more hours in, because it was really engaging,\u201d he says. \u201cI even got an award for the impact I was having with the kids.\u201d In addition, he joined an Urban League service group called Youth Forum, which enabled him to work on community projects along with other motivated students.<\/p>\n

When Gutierrez discusses his mentor\u2019s influence, he recalls her practical advice and the start she gave him in community service. But more than anything, she convinced him that a college education would change his life. For years, he and his friends had been told that education was important, but they didn\u2019t believe it. Part of the trouble, he says, was \u201ca disconnection between what we were doing in school and what it was supposed to prepare us for. It was like learning random information; it was never anything that seemed valuable to us, anything that seemed like it would help us in the long run.\u201d Since no one in their families had gone to college, the opportunities that people kept talking about didn\u2019t seem real to them.<\/p>\n

Now, when Gutierrez visits his younger siblings, ages 13 and 8, he sees the difference it makes that they<\/em> have a college student in the family. (In fact, they have two; Gutierrez\u2019s older brother, Manuel, is a senior at Wright State University.) \u201cWhen I talk to them, I always ask, \u2018What do you want to do?\u2019 My little brother is always messing with me: \u2018I want to be a doctor, and I also <\/em>want to be an astronaut.\u2019 The fact he is even bringing up those ideas is phenomenal. And he knows that in order to do something like these big grand ideas, he has to go and get an education.\u201d<\/p>\n

Extending a Pathway<\/h3>\n

As an undergraduate, Gutierrez has been an active seeker of opportunities. In the spring of his freshman year, he applied to CCEL\u2019s Civic Engagement Fellowship program and became one of eight first-year students placed as volunteers in community organizations. That is how he discovered Esperanza. As a sophomore, he spent an \u201calternative spring break\u201d in a Nicaraguan village, where he and 13 other CCEL students helped parents build a kitchen for an elementary school and participated in activities with local children.<\/p>\n

Each summer, Gutierrez devotes himself to science. In 2009, he was selected to participate in the Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training Program, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He spent 12 weeks at Cornell University\u2019s biomedical research center in the Dominican Republic, conducting chemical assays of indigenous plants to find out whether they might have medical uses. The goal of such research is to help countries produce their own pharmaceuticals, instead of importing more expensive drugs from abroad.<\/p>\n

This year, Gutierrez was awarded a summer fellowship in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of California, San Diego. He participated in seminars on health disparities and shadowed doctors from UCSD\u2019s School of Medicine. On the research side, he worked on a new imaging tool that scientists can use to examine heart development and disease in an animal model\u2014the zebrafish. \u201cWe made the zebrafish heart glow bright green, so that we could better study it,\u201d he explains. In his spare time, he went surfing, a sport he first learned in Nicaragua. \u201cIt was a different type of water\u2014cold, comparatively\u2014but it was really fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back on campus, Gutierrez is involved in an NIH-funded project at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, where a research team is developing tools to teach minority patients to communicate effectively with their doctors. By engaging in a computer simulation of an office visit, these patients will learn to express concerns about their health, get their questions answered and obtain the information they need to manage chronic conditions.<\/p>\n

\"In

In a recent video celebrating its community partnerships, Esperanza devoted a segment to its relationship with CWRU’s Center for Civic Engagement and Learning. The video included an interview with Gutierrez. “It was a no-brainer to pick Omar,” says Jessica Gonzalez, Esperanza’s director of operations. Photo by Daniel Milner.<\/p><\/div>\n

Gutierrez was recruited for the project, known as Electronic Self-Management Resource Training to Reduce Health Disparities (eSMART-HD), by research associate Lisaann Gittner. During their first interview, he offered ideas from his study of cultural anthropology and discussed his commitment to health disparities research. Afterwards, Gittner called principal investigator John Clochesy, Independence Foundation Professor of Nursing Education, and said, \u201cWe need to hire Omar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gutierrez joined the team as it was collecting data on patients\u2019 experiences with the health care system. He proposed holding a focus group at Esperanza, where he translated the participants\u2019 comments and asked follow-up questions. Later, he was fully engaged in the process of analyzing the data, identifying issues that the simulation would address and writing a script for the virtual office visit.<\/p>\n

During meetings that sometimes went on until midnight or later, this script became more and more complicated. Each time patients were asked a question, the software had to present them with several responses to choose from. And each response, in turn, led down a different conversational pathway. As the team struggled with the wording of the responses and debated how many to offer at various points, Gutierrez wasn\u2019t afraid to speak up, even if he was the only undergraduate in a roomful of PhDs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was getting late one evening, and we were all getting a little punchy,\u201d Gittner recalls. \u201cOmar thought we were going in the wrong direction on this one pathway, and he just wouldn\u2019t let up until we heard him. We were at the point where we were just fatigued and ready to stop. But Omar said, \u2018No, you\u2019re doing a disservice here; this pathway needs to keep going.\u2019 He wanted to give the patients more choices; he wanted to include the breadth of things that people would actually say. And when we reflected on it, we realized that his idea was great. He was helping us make the script more real, so that people would see themselves in the simulation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dedicated to Something<\/h3>\n

CCEL director Elizabeth Banks describes Gutierrez as \u201csurprisingly even-keeled.\u201d He shows up at 8 a.m. to take charge of a volunteer site for a Saturday of Service, makes a presentation to entering students or drives a group of fellow tutors to the West Side without seeming overburdened. \u201cThe other students are so jealous that he\u2019s never stressed about his schoolwork,\u201d Banks says.<\/p>\n

Gutierrez thinks they have the wrong impression. \u201cLast year, I was doing entirely too much,\u201d he admits. \u201cI was going over to Esperanza; I was taking a good number of classes and taking leadership roles in these other civic groups. So a lot of times, I found myself really stressed out. Three o\u2019clock in the morning, I would be trying to get some work done, because the entire day I was gone doing all these other things. But I think that once you\u2019re dedicated to something, you\u2019ll find the time to do it. Because, in reality, it\u2019s just time that you would normally use to just sit around.\u201d Sitting around may be the only activity he hasn\u2019t fitted into his schedule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On an evening in late September, cloudy but not yet dark, two young men with book bags dangling from their shoulders arrived at Esperanza, an educational nonprofit on Cleveland\u2019s West Side. …Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":1245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artscimedia.case.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/147\/2010\/07\/14215534\/omar-composite_thumbnail.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1214"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3807,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions\/3807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}