‘I Know Firsthand What It Is Like to Feel Hopeless’

This article originally appeared in UCSB’s ‘The Current‘.

One cool summer day while lying on a paddle board, Lily Melendez looked out at her friends, also on the water, and spotted a nudibranch on one of their boards. That encounter with a rarely seen marine creature became a favorite UC Santa Barbara memory for Melendez — just one of many for the environmental studies and English double major who will graduate this week.

But Melendez will also leave her mark on campus. As an undergraduate, she had the unique opportunity to student-teach two undergraduate environmental science courses as well as a literature correspondence course offered through the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center for participants from California prisons. Her ambitious goals as an undergraduate, particularly in sustainable food studies — the topic of one of the courses she taught — were deeply informed by her personal experiences with food and housing insecurity.