Karla Mariana Ordonez Gonzales was born in Ica, Peru where she lived there for nine years. The city she is from is about four hours away from the capital of Peru and it’s also one of the most advanced cities in Peru. She grew up with her mom’s side of the family, which consisted of 20 first cousins and five aunts and uncles. She grew up in a really tight knit family so it was a hard transition when she moved to the United States of America and had no close family by her. But because of the loneliness she felt without close family by her except for her mom and dad she was really serious about school and ending up on top of her class. Mariana really knuckled down in school so she could get ahead of her classmates leading her to doing post-secondary school so she graduated high school with 40 credit college hours and fifth in her class. Also because of her hard work in high school she was able to get into the Ohio State University with a full-tuition scholarship for four years (Land Grant Scholarship).
Mariana is now a first year student at the Ohio State University who is majoring in Biology and is on the pre-medicine track. She hopes to get into the Ohio State medical school after she gets her bachelors in biology and hopes to one day become a cardiovascular surgeon. In order to get involved at her new home Mariana joined the Environmental and Natural Resources Scholars program. She joined this program because she wanted to make a difference in the world no matter how small. She had heard about the issues going on around the world about how the world’s environment keeps getting worse as years go by and how it affects the health of people living in the world. She knew that in the ENR program she would get to go outside and be a part of the community as she helps clean it and maintain it a better sustainable world for people to live in. She also joined the program because growing up she didn’t have a lot of opportunities to explore the outside world and she knew there would be plenty of opportunities in the ENR program to go on hikes, kayaking, etc. Mariana is excited to take on Ohio State.