By Angel Dominguez
Dominican’s Chicago Campus, offers a new two-year program, located at 1805 S. Paulina Street in Pilsen, the Chicago Campus includes two buildings where students can live and attend classes: La Casa and The Resource Center.
As the Campus enters its fourth week leaders at the campus spoke about the semester so far, “It’s been one with many ups and downs, but altogether we were happy and hopeful for the students-a very successful opening,” said, Gema Ortega executive director of academic affairs for the Chicago campus.
Adding that the program’s addition aligns with Dominican’s mission, “the premise of being here in Pilsen is to offer access for students to higher education”. She praised the location of the new campus, giving students a more intimate space and comfortable living distance in Chicago.
Ortega outlined the four career-ready focuses embedded in the program: cybersecurity, nurse assistant, translation and interpretation, or legal studies. She explained that the program offers students the option to continue their studies at Dominican after completion, as well as the opportunity to become work-ready through certification exams.
With most faculty teaching as adjunct professors, Cutberto Aguayo and Raquel Fullerton expressed their gratitude for the opportunity to teach historically under-resourced students.
Fullerton, who teaches a mathematics course to all 52 students, believes the new program is important, because it creates a comfortable space for students to begin their college journey outside of a traditional 4-year university setting. She emphasized that the small cohorts allow for more individualized attention and one-on-one engagement with students.
Fullerton added that the opportunity to work specifically with black and brown students and build something from the start is what attracted her to the Chicago Campus.
“I see a lot of myself in the students,” said Aguayo, a Dominican alum and Chicago native, “Ten, 12 years ago, I was in the exact same shoes as them”, he added that during his time as an undergraduate at DU, he was deeply impacted by seeing professors of color and hopes to provide similar guidance to the students in Pilsen.
Aguayo, who grew up on the south side of Chicago, described the new campus as an “incubation of opportunities [and] a space where we’re bringing the ethos and mission of Dominican. [We are] expanding that to Chicago, and that’s really important.”
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