Miguel Rivera is a freshman at Bakersfield College who plans on majoring in psychology.

When asked about BC, Rivera said, “I believe it’s better, you know, there’s more variety and a lot of more opportunities definitely. I guess it’s just more chances to discover what you want to do in life. I want to really take the time to figure out what I want to do. I’m not in an hurry.”

Rivera mentioned his goals for the major he’s chosen. “With psychology, being flexible, you know, with various fields. I want to teach, and I also do counseling, but if I don’t necessarily like that, I want to go into research,” said Rivera. “Ideally, I would love it to be with brain neuroscience. Just how the brain affects people. It would be great to make a contribution to that field.”

Rivera has always been curious about people, which has led him to ask questions about them. How people learn to control their anger is interesting to him.

“I would like to work at a mental hospital and talk to criminals, maybe work in the criminal system… talk to psychopaths, but that’s an idea,” he said. “I could always work with children or it could be counseling. I believe there’s a story behind everything and everyone.”

“It’s pretty bad how sometimes in the media that there’s always the criminal. Then there’s always the stereotype that, OK, this person killed this many people. People never ask the questions that need to be asked.

“People don’t ask, well, did this person have a good childhood? What can we learn from this person? Did this person never get a simple hug? Or it can go as simple as an ‘I love you’ from a parent. They never got that, so I think we can learn a lot from these people.

“Sometimes we let our prejudice own us, and we need to go beyond that and ask the real tough question. Obviously there’s lots of factors like biological, social, but a lot of it can be sided as the brain.”

Rivera said, “I believe that no one is normal because normal is an idea in our head and in reality everyone has a story, and an average 5-year-old kid has a story.”