For the past year and a half, Briana Baldovinos has worked at the “Happiest Place on Earth”...Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, where she dances in the Main Street Parade.

Before enrolling at UC Riverside, she used to dance ballet, jazz and tap – “everything” – for an average of five hours a day. She’s been dancing since she was three years old.

“I’ve always loved to dance and want to keep it up,” she says. “For the Disney gig, they held auditions and I went and got the job. My idol is Misty Copeland. As the first African-American female principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater in New York City, she broke boundaries for what a woman of color could achieve in ballet.”

A Neuroscience major and recent UC Riverside graduate, Briana is breaking some boundaries herself along with her brother, a pre-med student at UC Riverside. “There is no one on either side of my family that has ever been in the medical field,” she says. “We are the first.” Briana’s mom works as an office manager for the Union for American Physicians and Dentists, and her dad drives trucks out of the Port of Los Angeles.

Coming from Corona, CA, Briana wanted to find a college close to home from which she could commute to school, and UC Riverside fit the bill perfectly. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to look over the campus personally because I started during COVID,” she says. “I checked out UC Riverside’s website – and just looking at pictures of the campus and the new medical school, it seemed like a good fit for me.”

Briana says that the trick to successful community plays into one of her natural tendencies: scheduling. “I am very much a set schedule person,” she says. “I need to have everything written down in a planner. During the pandemic I didn’t have to commute for my first year, but going into my second year when we started back up, it was a bit of a struggle. I just had to make sure I adhered to a routine.”

For Briana, that meant waking up in plenty of time to get ready for school, which included making and packing a lunch and accounting for potential traffic snarls. “My commute is only 35 minutes without traffic, so that’s not bad...but there were days when everyone was on the interstate! I don’t like to rush, so I made sure to leave when I could drive more leisurely. Look at the traffic maps on your phone in the morning to make sure there isn’t construction or accidents on your route and don’t get lazy with your routine. Adhere to it and you’ll be okay.”

Briana describes herself as a “hands-on” learner. “I love making new discoveries, and applying what I learn in lecture courses to labs allows me to better grasp the concepts,” she says. Just like in her dancing, Briana says she gets a kick out of “seeing a reaction unfold. The discipline and patience that lab work takes is something that I love.”

Hands-on learning was more than a euphemism for Briana at the beginning of her stint in college as a first-generation student and amid the challenges presented by the pandemic.

“My first advisor, Mario Trejo, influenced me greatly, she says. “He was the mentor I had during COVID and as a first-generation student, I literally didn’t have any guidance. All the questions I asked my mom were deferred. She didn’t graduate from high school. My dad ended getting his GED later on. They both said: ‘You can’t ask us. We don’t know.’ I felt bad asking Mario so many questions and sending him so many emails, but he was very reassuring. He told me to ask as many questions as I wanted. He said: ‘I’d rather you ask than not ask and be late on something like applying for financial aid or registering for classes incorrectly.’”

According to Briana, asking questions was a huge factor in her academic success and it’s also the best advice she could give any incoming freshman to UCR. “Approaching teachers was very overwhelming, especially because during COVID, the classes were all streamed,” she says. “On Zoom, if I had a question, I could pop in real quick versus being in a classroom-type setting where you had to personally approach instructors one-on-one with the fear that you might ask a dumb question.

“Sometimes in class you might look around and start comparing yourself to other students,” Briana adds. “From my perspective, I sometimes thought: ‘They seem so ahead,’ whereas I felt I hadn’t done this or that. The issue of asking questions was also compounded by my fear that I should already have known the answer to what my question was.”

Briana says that her biggest supporter, her mother, told her not to be afraid to ask questions for clarification about anything. "She told me I had every resource at UC Riverside to draw on and that I’d be good," Briana remembers. “I took that advice to heart and found that when I asked questions, the fog lifted and my professors were encouraging – almost endearing – in that they told me we could go through the answers step-by-step. That was a light bulb moment for me!”

For Briana, it was mostly about overcoming a rooted fear that people would judge her. “But, hey, we as students all have better things to do," she realized. "It was largely a groundless fear, but one that I could only overcome for myself.”

As any incoming college freshman can attest, the transition from high school to college can be fraught, and study techniques learned in high school may not always successfully transition with the student. “I feel I learned so many different, helpful techniques trying to nail down what would work for me,” Briana says.

One winning study technique was going through her lecture slides, thoroughly, the same day. “If I have class that morning, I’d go through them that night,” she says. “I’m the type of person who if I write stuff down over and over again, I’ll be able to memorize it. So, with the lecture slides, I’ll go through maybe 10 at a time and then I try to memorize as much as I can. I’ll then I dump everything that I’ve remembered on a piece of paper. And everything that I’ve missed, I’ll write in a different color – and that paper will be what I need to further memorize. It’s a technique that really works for me.”

Briana counts serving as Vice President of Community Building on the CNAS Science Ambassador Leadership Team from 2023-2024 as a highpoint of her UC Riverside tenure. She was also involved in UC Riverside’s Latino Medical Student Association as Marketing Chair, and she performed outreach to high school and middle school students through the Medical Education Executive Project, helping them to become CPR-certified, how to use EpiPens, and how to apply a tourniquet using just a pen and rubber band.

“I was also a member of UCR Hooks, where we crocheted ‘granny squares’ which we would give to the leadership team. They would connect them and make blankets that they’d give away to the homeless.”

Briana’s immediate future plans include taking a gap year and hopefully landing a cruise contract as a dancer, during which time she’ll have six months to a year to study for the MCAT and then take the test. “I’d like to attend medical school at UC Riverside,” she says.

For Briana, that would fulfill a dream, and could well turn out to be her next “Happiest Place on Earth.”

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