Scholarships big part of alumnus' success

By Mark Muckenfuss

Fabian Cruz-Ruiz credits the support he received while a student at Cal State Monterey Bay with getting him to grad school and, now, a position with the Superior Court of Monterey. 

As a first-generation college student from Salinas, Cruz-Ruiz said he benefited from the College Assistance Migrant Program as well as the Department of Education’s TRIO program. But his path was also made easier by some key scholarships he received along the way, including the John Kobata Accounting and the Women's Leadership Council scholarships.

“It really helped me,” said Cruz-Ruiz, who graduated from CSUMB in 2024 with a degree in business administration. “It’s kind of like I had the engine, I just needed the fuel for it.”

Even with the financial support he received, he said, he still had to work part time while he was in school, but he was able to avoid taking out loans. Not only did it reduce the stress of having to make hard financial choices, but it also opened up avenues he said he otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. 

“It helped me pursue opportunities outside of the classroom,” he said, “like an internship with Deloitte in San Francisco over the summer.”

He was also an intern with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in the Pantetta Congressional Internship program in Washington, D.C. He also studies abroad in Amsterdam. But perhaps the most important door he was able to open was the one that led to the Summer Institute for Emerging Managers and Leaders. That two-week program, which is organized by the graduate business programs in the UC system, provides an overview of the various UC graduate business offerings. It provided him with a full year of tuition as he pursued his graduate studies.  

Cruz-Ruiz chose to attend UC Irvine, earning a master’s degree in business analytics. At one point, he felt he was ahead of the game. 

“My undergraduate education really prepared me for graduate education,” he said. “They introduced us to the capstone concept, and I said, ‘I’ve already done this.’” Most of his classmates, he added, had not

He was recently hired as a fiscal assistant by the Superior Court of Monterey. He plans to return to school to pursue a law degree with the goal of practicing corporate law.

Had it not been for the programmatic and scholarship support he received at CSUMB, Cruz-Ruiz doesn’t think it’s likely he’d be where he is now. The CAMP and TRIO programs, he said, helped guide him to campus resources and showed him how to organize his educational journey.

“Because I knew how to do that early on, it really helped me to excel,” he said. “It gave me a strong foundation and showed me what I was capable of. I hope it shows other first-generation students that, with the right support, they can achieve the same.”