When Brandon Garcia ’26 was in middle school, he and his younger brother were always the last students to get picked up by their parents. This used to upset Garcia, and he asked his parents why they were perpetually late; they explained that they both had full-time jobs and often had to work overtime to support the family — his mother as a dental assistant and his father as a truck driver.
“That’s when I realized how hard my parents were working,” Garcia says. “I think all kids want to support their families, whether financially or in some other way, and I definitely want to be that person, to take care of my parents. That’s the motivation that pushed me to attend college, and to be the first person in my family to do so.”
Always a promising student, Garcia’s commitment to his studies strengthened once he understood the struggles faced by his mother and father, who are from Mexico and El Salvador, respectively. With his excellent high school grades, Garcia was able to choose from several quality colleges. He went with LMU because it was close to his mid-city home, it had a beautiful campus, and it offered strong professional networking opportunities in addition to good academic programs.
Much to his delight, Garcia received enough scholarship support from both the university and his high school to enable him to live on campus his freshman year and fully immerse himself in the college experience. An initial bout with loneliness and anxiety was quickly overcome when he joined the soccer club, where he was able to indulge his longstanding passion for the sport while making supportive new friends. He also credits the Coca-Cola First-Generation Scholarship with not only financially supporting his studies but connecting him with the First To Go program and its warm community of first-generation students. Since 1998, the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation has supported first-generation students at LMU with 37 scholarships totaling approximately $300,000.
“I think all kids want to support their families, whether financially or in some other way, and I definitely want to be that person, to take care of my parents. That’s the motivation that pushed me to attend college, and to be the first person in my family to do so.”
Brandon Garcia ’26
Garcia has always been strong in math and he knew he wanted to achieve financial stability in order to support his parents. It wasn’t until a pivotal experience in his last year of high school, however, that everything came full circle for him in terms of choosing a field of study. That year, he accompanied his father on a trip back to El Salvador, where they met up with his father’s best friend, an accountant. Garcia learned that prior to emigrating to the U.S., his father had been an accountant too.
“He had a degree, he had the certificate, and he had a job lined up,” Garcia explains. “But his mother passed away, and her final wish had been for my dad to leave the country because it was getting too dangerous and she wanted him to have a better life. So, he left everything, he left his accounting career and came here and ended up being a truck driver. I asked him why he didn’t continue doing accounting, and he said that he just didn’t know, he felt like he had to take whatever was offered to him just to survive.”
Garcia was deeply moved by this story and felt a stronger connection to his father than ever. He decided right then and there to become an accountant himself. “I want to continue what my dad never got to finish; I want to complete his story. He was so close to having a very stable life, but it was all lost. My goal now, with my accounting degree from LMU, is to work for one of the big four accounting firms, establish myself there, then branch out and probably do my own thing. And if I were to start my own firm, it would be a dream come true if I could have my dad by my side, if we could work together so that he can do what he loves again.”
Now a sophomore, Garcia has moved back into his family’s home for practical and financial reasons, but he continues to thrive and be fully engaged with campus life. He is a member of two fraternities — Sigma Chi, which he represents at the LMU Interfraternity Council, and the Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity — and serves as director of finance for the Latinx Business Association and director of technology for the LMU Accounting Society. He is well on his way to achieving his own dreams as an accounting major — and possibly reviving his father’s lost dreams as well.
If you’d like to support LMU First To Go programs and/or student scholarships, you can make a gift here.
