2024 Outstanding Students of the Year

Karina Juarez
She/Her/Hers
Fine Arts & Art Education
Karina Juarez passionately preserves and celebrates her heritage through visual art. As a ceramist, Juarez embraces the land through her Zapotec ancestry, tenderly connecting historical customs and symbols into clay through a contemporary lens rooted in colonial resistance. As both an artist and student, she is dedicated to sharing knowledge and expanding space for underrepresented...

Aerin Monroe
He/Him/His
Environmental Studies
For the last two years of his academic career in Humboldt County, as a student member of the INRSEP (Indian Natural Resources, Science and Engineering Program + Diversity in STEM (INRSEP+) at Cal Poly) and an indigenous person of the Americas and beyond, Aerin embodies the INRSEP+ house mission– to braid ancestors' wisdom with modern Western science techniques and cutting-edge...


























