AURORA | Ryan Manzanares kept turning the small wooden block over in her hand as she talked about the power of three.
She’d just received the patterned piece of wood as a graduation gift from a fellow student at the Community College of Aurora, a mentor who insisted that the object was a talisman bearing an important message. The simple shapes carved into the wood held symbolic meaning, Manzanares explained as she sat on a bench at CCA’s CentreTech Campus a few days before her graduation. The engraved circles and lines spoke to a common pattern behind life’s most major upsets and victories.
“Everything happens in threes,” Manzanares said, before applying the rule to the most important recent events in her own life. She ticked off a list of two defeats and a major victory: dropping out of high school, going through a traumatic stint working at a major corporation and, finally, graduating from CCA. “Now I’m back up to the top. That’s the big picture.”
Manzanares, 25, kept that big picture in mind as she walked across the stage along with 238 fellow CCA graduates during the school’s graduation ceremony on May 11. It’s a larger perspective that helped her make the transition from a shy and quiet freshman still scarred by past trauma to an outspoken activist at the top of her outgoing class. It helped pull her through the stress and strain of losing her mother, of having to be the live-in caretaker for her father.
“I was so nervous about school. It was really big for me,” Manzanares said, recalling the first classes she took more than two years ago. “I’m the first person in my family to start (college).”
Being the first family member to attend college wasn’t the only source of stress when Manzanares signed up for her first CCA courses. She’d already been through the toll of dropping out of high school, a decision that forced her to look for steady and reliable work as a teenager. The job she found quickly turned traumatic. She was sexually harassed on the job, and the culprit initially went unpunished. After a lengthy legal battle, her harasser was fired and she came away with a settlement that barred her from mentioning the name of her former employer.
She’d been vindicated in a legal sense, but Manzanares was left with no job and no income. The decision to sign up for classes at CCA came after plenty of emotional trauma.
“I was like, ‘What do I do now?’ I was 22, I’d been in machine operating,” she said. “I was really nervous and really quiet. I used to wear all black. I didn’t want to talk to anybody.”
It was the school’s faculty that helped bring her out of her shell, and in a big way. With encouragement from teachers and CCA staff like Director of Student Life Angie Tiedeman, Manzanares found her niche at the school. She started participating in student government. She joined the honor society Phi Theta Kappa. In her role as vice chair for the Student Advisory Council, Manzanares spoke on behalf of her fellow students during debates about Senate Bill 165, which would have allowed community colleges to grant four-year degrees.
That kind of activism, developed in political science classes at CCA, didn’t end with Manzanares’ graduation earlier this month. She’s planning on starting at the University of Denver in the fall for her bachelor’s degree. She wants to move on to law school after that, and eventually find a job in law. Ultimately, she wants to start her own homeless rehabilitation center.
In order to realize those goals, Manzanares knows she’ll have to keep the bigger perspective in mind. As she pulled the small wooden talisman from her purse, she framed her ambitions in terms of three.
“Now it’s bachelor’s degree, juris doctorate and getting a job with the district attorney or public defender,” she said. “I’m excited, nervous and ready to go.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
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