Texas Border Business
PHARR- A Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District (PSJA ISD) alum has been accepted as part of the New York Times third Times Fellowship class. Adrian Rivera, who will be serving as an Opinion Editing Fellow, was selected from a pool of more than 3,000 applicants from across the world.
Rivera graduated from PSJA North Early College High School in 2016. He was part of the PSJA ISD Early College Program in partnership with South Texas College (STC) and graduated with an Associate Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies two weeks before receiving his high school diploma. He graduated from Yale University in 2020 where he majored in History and was part of the Mellow Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.
“I’d like to thank PSJA North and PSJA ISD for the opportunity to take courses concurrently at STC; it was through the Early College program that I took my first creative writing class, a class that helped me find my way to writing and editing,” Rivera said. “I’m grateful, too, to the district and to the school for providing me with a host of wonderful teachers.”
As a student at Yale University, Rivera was a staff columnist at the Yale Daily News and became the paper’s first Latino Opinion editor. The PSJA alum spent the last year as a freelance ghostwriter and editor.
“My early college experience taught me that who you were learning from mattered just as much, or more, in some ways, than what you were learning. It’s a lesson I carried with me into college, and that I’ll take with me for the rest of my life,” Rivera shared.
