For Some Grads, It Came With Degree of Difficulty

The shotgun blast ripped his spine and knocked Carlos Von Son to the ground of the deep canyon, rendering his legs useless.

Lying there waiting for help, alone with his fear, he stared at the stars in the moonless evening sky and thought about dying.

But hours after he was accidentally shot by a hunting partner, rescuers began arriving and he developed a second thought: “I remember thinking if I could live I would not mind being disabled. I remember thinking that’s much better than being dead. That thought made my adjustment, made me adapt to a new way of life.”

On Saturday, 15 years later, that new life culminated with his receiving a doctorate in Latin American literature from UC Irvine. Von Son was among the 3,858 receiving degrees during ceremonies in Aldrich Park and the Bren Events Center.

For some, getting to this point meant navigating life’s detours and obstacles, whether using an unexpected disability to tap the artistic spirit within; finding the courage to change course when other challenges beckoned, or strengthening the resolve to learn when a source of inspiration is no longer there.

Eleana Post, 25, gave up the pro surfing circuit that took her around the world to settle down and get a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, a step toward a career as a doctor.

Felicia Luna Lemus, 22, of Orange, faced up to the death of her father by zealously pursuing the education he and other family members encouraged her to get. Prizes for her research papers followed and, after graduation with a bachelor’s degree in history, she plans to become an elementary school teacher.

And Von Son, 43, a farming advisor before his accident, turned a boyhood interest in poetry and writing into a career teaching Spanish literature. He will soon begin his academic career as an assistant professor at Cal State San Marcos in northern San Diego County.

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Von Son himself looks back on his journey to this point in wonderment. While living in Santa Cruz, Mexico, he worked as an agricultural technician, advising farmers on the best way to grow tomatoes. On the side, he wrote poems, an interest he ascribes to his mother’s stories about her father, a political prisoner in Spain who had died many years before.

One evening, he and a friend set out to find the leader of a pack of rodents that lived in a steep canyon near the farms and was snacking on the crops. While the pair were walking into the deepest stretches, the friend’s gun suddenly went off, sending four shotgun pellets into Von Son’s back.

They were miles from any help, so Von Son figured he would die, or at least be disabled since he had no feeling in his legs. Doctors confirmed his fears. He is a paraplegic.

Von Son began a new life making leather crafts and doing minimal gardening. Going to college in Mexico proved difficult because of bureaucratic hassles and spotty access for the disabled. A brother living in Los Angeles encouraged him to try school in the United States.

Von Son agreed and first entered Orange Coast College, then UCI, where he uses a tricycle-like bike to get around campus. After earning a bachelor’s degree he went on to graduate studies in Spanish, along the way writing poetry and short stories and tutoring state prison inmates through a UCLA arts outreach program.

He is finishing a book of short stories based on the immigrant experience and nostalgia for one’s homeland and plans to instill in his students an appreciation for creative writing.

“Art is one of the best things humankind has,” he said. “You can not only express what goes on inside of you but ideology comes through writing too. Creative writing opens that door.”

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Although she did not have to cope with a disability, Post too moved toward higher education through an abrupt change in life.

Since middle school, every morning and some evenings she would pull out her surf board and ride the fabled waves off Huntington Beach, developing a prowess that propelled her to national rankings on the amateur circuit. She was the girls’ U.S. high school champion in 1988 and 1989. Later, as a professional, she ranked 11th internationally.

But even as she traveled the world to such places as Bali, Barbados, Spain and Japan, in the back of her mind she felt education calling.

“It was almost something that kind of haunted me,” she said. So, three years ago, after earning an associate’s degree at Golden West College, she gave up professional surfing and headed for UCI.

She picked chemistry as a major because she had always loved the logic and thought processes behind math and science and figured it would help prepare her for medical school, to which she is applying. In the next year or so, however, she will seek work as a science teacher while she prepares her medical school applications.

Where she used to surf at least two hours per day, now she’s lucky if she gets in the water once a week. But Post has no regrets.

“I try to remind myself that I made the best decision,” she said.

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Lemus also is heading for a teaching career and will enter UCI’s teacher credentialing program in the fall.

Although her family instilled the value of education in her from a young age, the death of her father from cancer a few years ago fired a passion for learning in Lemus that yielded numerous honors for her research projects.

Among them were the Hubert Prize in Women’s Studies for a paper called “Mammies, Housewives and Harlots: Images of Black and White Womanliness in 1930s Popular Culture.”

Of the death of her father, a computer management consultant who held a doctorate in biology, she said: “You try to find good lessons from awful things. It really inspired me to make the most of every day and my education.”

Those were things her father always told her, but “his death made it a very real lesson.”

After receiving her credential, she plans to become a fifth-grade teacher because at that level children are getting their first serious exposure to U.S. history.

“I want to apply all the things I learned,” she said. “I want to provide them with a fuller understanding of what history is all about.”