Student Perspectives

The Blinn College Schwartz Building opened on the RELLIS Campus for the fall semester of 2018. More than 1,500 students attended classes at the site to inaugurate higher-education learning on the site of the old Bryan Army Air Field.

Below are interviews with two of those first students to attend Academic Alliance classes at RELLIS.

James Loya was born and raised in Tyler, Texas. He finished his associates degree at Tyler Junior College where he was involved in a variety of leadership and community-service organizations. Within the RELLIS Academic Alliance, he is pursuing his degree in business, where he hopes to be in the first RELLIS class to graduate with a bachelors degree in Business Administration. 

Rosalba Gutierrez Martinez was born in the small Mexican town of Jerez de Garcia Salinas, Zacatecas. The youngest of six children, at the age of two she and her family moved to the U.S, and settled in Bryan, Texas. Rosalba attended Kemp-Carver Elementary, Davila Middle School and Rudder High School, as well as the Hammond Oliver Science Academy. In middle school, she played the violin, and in high school, she was a member of the Hammond Oliver FLOW Club and served as the organization’s vice president her senior year. As a student of the RELLIS Academic Alliance, she is majoring in finance.