New PAU Alum Juan Gonzalez Inspires with Incredible Perseverance

At last month’s commencement ceremony, Juan Gonzalez was one of three hundred Palo Alto University (PAU) students who became alumni. Gonzalez, who graduated with a PhD in Clinical Psychology with a neuropsychology emphasis, is committed to offering neuropsychological services in Spanish so that patients who are native Spanish speakers feel better understood.

“I love what I do. The smile a patient has when they finally see a Spanish-speaking provider is the most rewarding part of the experience. They finally have someone they can speak to directly, who understands their culture and where they are coming from,” says Gonzalez, whose first language is Spanish. “In the area of neuropsychology, the Latinx population is underserved. There aren’t many bilingual neuropsychologists in the field. I’m very passionate about the bilingual work.”

Humble Beginnings

Dr. Gonzalez is the first person in his family to receive a college degree, let alone a doctorate. When Gonzalez was five years old, his family immigrated from Jalisco, Mexico, to a suburb of Los Angeles. As a high school student, Gonzalez wanted to attend college, but his parents were undocumented, raising four children, and lacked the financial means. Luckily, the University of California, Merced accepted his application and offered a generous scholarship, however, he still needed eight thousand dollars upfront to attend.

“That summer after high school graduation was very stressful. I had signed up for my dorm, but even two weeks before move-in day, I still didn’t know if my parents could come up with the money,” says Gonzalez. “But through the support of my family and friends, we were able to do it. This was the first of many obstacles I had to overcome in order to arrive at graduation day.”

Once he began college, he was faced with the next financial hurdle of paying for living expenses. Throughout his undergraduate, he worked two to three jobs. In his second year, the federal government passed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that allowed undocumented students to apply for financial aid, which provided the funds for him to continue his education.

From 2016 to 2023, he attended PAU for his master’s and doctorate degrees in psychology. Due to the added expense of living in the Bay Area, Gonzalez repeated the pattern of collecting jobs. He worked as an admin in the PAU financial aid department, at the Gronowski Clinic as a clinic manager (and eventually as senior clinical manager), and at the PAU Director of Clinical Training (DCT) office. He also drove for Uber a few days a week to make ends meet. 

“There were periods of time where I worked close to 40 hours per week, on top of the pressures of being a full-time student and doing practicum hours at three different sites. I was working morning until night for those seven years,” says Gonzalez. “I don’t know how I pushed through. I simply didn’t give myself the choice to quit. When things got hard, I focused on why I came in the first place.”

Finances were not the only obstacle Gonzalez needed to hurdle. Once he started college, he realized he had a different experience growing up than most of his peers. In high school, Gonzalez didn’t have a mentor, so he had to create the mindset of a college graduate and figure out the steps of pursuing higher education independently.

“In high school, many of my peers probably already knew they were going to go to college and had parents who mentored them through the process. Although my parents loved and supported me, they didn’t go to college, so I didn’t have any of that kind of support,” says Gonzalez. “I had to figure out how to fill out my FAFSA forms on my own. How to decide which classes to take and how to sign up for them. Looking back, I don’t know how a 17-year-old managed that. I was determined.”

Support from PAU

While at PAU, Gonzalez worked at Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care, and as a neuropsychology doctoral trainee at UCSF and San Francisco Neuropsychology. In addition, he had supplemental positions within the UCSF health care system, Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and at the Gronowski Clinic. He also received more than $15,000 in scholarships and emergency funds from PAU and sought practicums that served the Latinx community, such as working at La Clínica Latina.

“Working at Clínica Latina, I saw the huge need for Spanish-speaking providers. I received a lot of support from my supervisor Dr. Elisabet Revilla, who is bilingual and trained me in providing psychological services in Spanish,” says Gonzalez. “When I went to UCSF for practicum, they were seeing Spanish-speaking patients, but they often had a hard time defending the validity and clinical utility of the assessments because they didn’t know if their cognition was impaired due to neurological problems or the language barrier. So, when I brought the adequate tools and skills to administer assessments in Spanish, this made a huge improvement to the level of care offered at UCSF.”

Along with his supervisors at La Clínica Latina, Gonzalez attributes his success to Dr. Brandon Kopald, who supervised and mentored him at UCSF, and his PAU advisor Rowena Gomez, PhD. “Very early on, Dr. Gomez had meetings with me to look at my CV and give me feedback on where the gaps were and how to fill those gaps, so that I could be more competitive,” says Gonzalez. “I’m grateful for that mentorship. If it weren’t for her early push and guidance, I wouldn’t have landed clinical practicums at UCSF and San Francisco Neuropsychology, which helped me land my internship at UCLA.”

After a year as an intern at UCLA Semel Hispanic Neuropsychiatric Center, offering bilingual and bicultural neuropsychological assessments, Gonzalez has been hired as a post-doc at the same facility and begins in August. Although this is a two-year position, his career goal is to continue working at an academic medical center, like UCLA, because he enjoys the interdisciplinary work that comes with working at large academic medical centers. Now that he has returned to Los Angeles, he plans on offering mentorship in the community from which he came.

“Even though I have a PhD, it’s important to remain humble, embrace my roots, and remember where I came from,” says Gonzalez. “So many of us see too many obstacles to go to college, but I hope my accomplishments serve as a testament that ‘when there’s a will, there’s a way.’ I’m looking forward to being the mentor I didn’t have while growing up, helping my community and giving back.”