Student Stories - Nico Salter

Often, we say that our students have come from diverse backgrounds and that their journey is just beginning when they leave CGCC. It’s never been more true than with Nicolas “Nico” Salter. Nico attended CGCC in 2014-15, then transferred to University of Oregon. Our interview with this charismatic and insightful young man highlights that for CGCC students, you truly can start here, and go anywhere.

How did your journey bring you to CGCC?

I arrived in Hood River in the summer of 2013, at age 16, and enrolled at Hood River Valley High School. I was eager to move to the US and did so abruptly, at a time that may have seemed questionable. It certainly took a lot to convince my family to let me go for it.   
When I arrived, I became a freshman and a senior at once: while kids were emerging from the crucible of college applications, I was starting kitchen jobs, driving a vehicle full of teenagers for the first time, finding my first apartment, learning to kiteboard, and engaging in local politics, etc.

In some way, I missed out on the punishing pressures of the university application process that most American teenagers undergo at that early age. I came from a country with suffocating rates of youth unemployment, and I wanted to work and become independent before thinking about school, despite being academically inclined.

Omitting the usual college application process could have barred me from pursuing higher education in many societies. But the community college is a beautiful American institution, and CGCC gave me the chance to regroup for one year and make wise choices about my future instead of making rash moves to keep up with a crowd I hadn’t even met yet. After settling in my adoptive community and working kitchen jobs, I realized how much I missed academic settings and decided to pursue university out of my own volition, with a clear purpose.

CGCC’s multi-generational student body and its wealth of life experiences, the small classes, our local Hood River Library, and the close relationships I was able to develop with beloved professors like Leigh Hancock, Tim Schell, and John Copp, gave me academic momentum I rode all the way to my LSATs last year. Some of my very close friends, like Jessamyn Hailey, are people I met at CGCC. Still to this day, after gaining familiarity with a few universities, I can say I encountered some of the brightest, most grounded people in my life in community college.

One observation I’ve made over the years is that most 4-year universities have a remarkable percentage of students coaxed into being there by their parents or societal custom. The beauty of CGCC is that most folks who are there really want it. Some are looking for new ways to provide for their families, some are financially responsible teenagers who don’t have recourse to generational wealth, and some are even escaping abusive marriages. They all see CGCC as a portal to a better life.
In the era of college debt and rural-urban divides, I hope community colleges can play a role in giving people a more purposeful college experience, paths to vocational occupations that should carry immense prestige in our society, and forums in which to engage with people with radically different life experiences.

Where did you transfer to finish your degree?

I transferred to the University of Oregon after my year at CGCC. I finished my degree while attending the Paris Institute of Political Studies in France, so I had a rich and variegated undergraduate experience.

What led you to want to pursue a major in Political Science?

I wanted to study philosophy, political philosophy, comparative politics, sociology, and history all at once. I like reading and wanted to understand the genealogy of ideas that paved the way for today’s dominant ideologies on the left and right. I wanted to understand the intellectual roots of the political stalemate we are witnessing and our cultural clashes. The PS path gave me the latitude to do all that.

You’ve been accepted to Yale Law School–congratulations! You said you deferred for a year due in part to work commitments. What do you do currently, and what about it is so compelling that it made you want to defer?

I work as Thrive Hood River’s executive director. Thrive is Hood River’s land use watchdog. “Land-use” is not a sexy word, which is a challenge we work on because land use encompasses many of the world’s most critical issues: housing, disappearing farmland, wildfire prevention, and climate change. You can’t really tackle these fronts without good land use policy. In fact, you could argue that all of these problems stem from bad uses of land, such as building sprawlingly in high-risk areas for wildfires. So good land use policy for Hood River is what Thrive is about.

One thing I’d love to see taught at CC and high school here is that aside from being one of the most beautiful places in the world, the Hood River Valley is an agricultural mecca of national significance. As the West’s ag hubs below Oregon dry up, this land, the Willamette Valley, and Oregon, in general, will play a greater and greater role in feeding the world. But agriculture is very hard work, and if we don’t protect it, it goes away, and other enterprises replace it, like restaurants, second homes, or resorts. Another land use topic is housing. CGCC students may have noticed that Hood River is, in fact, the most expensive place to buy a house in all of Oregon. At Thrive, we are trying to work with the City to show we can also become the best policy lab for solving this.

As to the deferral. Yale Law’s administration and faculty somehow manage to work closely with every single student upon admittance. I have spoken a few times to the Dean of Admissions about career choices, which is an invaluable resource for a prospective student. I was pretty amazed at how available she made herself to think things through with me on the phone and in person. When I talked to her about what the work at Thrive meant to me, she gave me the green light for a deferral and was very supportive. Aside from CGCC and Yale, my experience with college administrations has been more impersonal and obstacle-like. But at Yale Law, even a faculty member has reached out to chat about my work and encourage me to write an article about it someday, so I’ve been incredibly moved by the level of institutional support. I’m still pretty shaken by it.

Also, Yale Law is unique among law schools for its large output of students who go on to serve the public interest, so I’m positive my work at Thrive will help me make the most out of my law school experience, be a better classmate, and a better student that can one day bring good ideas back home to Oregon.

To summarize, I am lucky I did not have to make any hard choices and that both stages of life will complement each other.

What part does family play in your life?

I live with my partner, Mel, and am thankful for her every single day. Mel is my principal source of all good things in my day-to-day and maximizing my time with her is a great incentive to get things done. We carry on a beautiful life together. I also have a very supportive network of family around me and friends that are like family.

Since you ask about family: I grew up in a Mediterranean society, where family matters greatly. In a modern world that often encourages people to move far away to develop, I actually think it’s challenging to succeed or personally develop without having a family you love very close to you–be it a partner, a sibling, children, a very close friend, or whoever you’re lucky to have. How we behave around those nearest and most reliant on us is simply the best barometer for our ethics, our health of mind, and our growth as human beings, especially in a world full of artificial smiles and online appearances. And in my view, if you find success but are not lifting the lives of those around you, what’s the point? The best things in life are those you can share with loved ones, like homemade tarts, dinner feasts, and sunsets on the Oregon Coast.

What inspires you, and what advice would you give to current CGCC students?

I’m inspired by two types of characters. First, those who are so devoted to a cause that they lose a sense of self and ego. They do bold things; they take flak; they plow ahead because they believe in something, and they have made themselves means to the thing. Reading Nietzsche cemented this for me. Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil still give me goosebumps. 

My other most formative reads have featured the existential tension between pleasing society, that is, glad-handing for one’s advancement, versus being loyal to one’s ideals and beliefs, like Julien Sorel in Stendahls’ The Red and the Black or Lucien Chardon in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. In the first book, Sorel is a young man full of Napoleonic ideals who must adjust his character to fit into the restored monarchical regime in France. In Lost Illusions, Lucien has to dispense with ideals of art and beauty to find success in a world of muckrakers and yellow journalism. Both of them fail. In Oregon, I think of Tom McCall when I think about this theme. His life is best told in Brent Walth’s Fire at Eden’s Gate. Unlike the characters I just mentioned, McCall took a lot of political risks to enact his vision and leave us a better world. He was part of a generation of high-minded Oregonians–Republicans and Democrats–who kind of went against the times and left us great treasures, like the Gorge Scenic Area or the Twin Tunnels Trail.

I’m also inspired by those who are gifted expositors of beauty, not only of grand wonders but those who extract beauty from the trenches of day-to-day life. In Oregon, we have Brian Doyle, who recently passed away and was a great storyteller of Oregon’s many natural wonders and small towns. I’ve read a lot of his works this year. Another writer I love is Richard Ford.

Regarding advice for students, I will say that today there is a strong culture of obsessive “credential-collection” (a word I totally made up, I’m sure there is a better one). Students become fixated on getting into universities or graduate programs, and they start looking at jobs and personal interests as scout badges for some future resumé. More tragic even, they start thinking of socializing as networking. You just cannot live in the present like that.

My advice for students is to treat college as an opportunity to discover passions. It sounds wishy-washy, but this is the best time to soul-search and find what you are going to commit your time to once you graduate. Certainly, many, many folks find their way at other stages of life, but I think college is one of the best times to do so.

The hard truth is that rarely in your life will you have the time to read so broadly and devote your attention to so many topics in depth. Being in school is truly a luxury because you are being tasked with something that is soul-enriching: reading and learning. You are being tasked with self-improvement, which is not always the case when you are working. So I would tell students that now is the time to give each class your everything because it is difficult to know whether you really love a subject unless you dive deep into it. Read broadly; read well; see what feels like “work” and what feels like a subject you want to read under incandescent lighting in bed.

Once you find something that moves you, focus in-depth on it and see how you can contribute your grain of sand to the world through it. I know it’s counterintuitive, but I would not think about resumé-building or making yourself look interesting, but instead about making yourself interested. It’s a hard thing to find, but if you find what captivates you, success is almost guaranteed.
I would also restate that caring for your relationships and surrounding yourself with people you love is essential. Otherwise, the rest may seem pointless when things get hard, and you will lose steam and wonder what you are doing all of it for. There is no greater motivator than wanting to secure a happy livelihood for those around you.

What are your hobbies?

I love to read. I love to write. I love soccer, boxing, and kitesurfing. I love cooking and going on adventures with Mel. I would advise everyone to make the time to cook meals with those you love. That primordial ritual may be the most crucial hobby to master. 

Where do you see yourself in five years and what are your personal goals?

That’s a daunting question because I haven’t worked with timelines of that scale yet. I am human, and like many students, in the short term, I have very earthly goals like achieving financial security–enough to help loved ones around me; saying so should not be stigmatized, especially in these inflationary times.

As I said earlier, I would also like to contribute to the state of our cities and be a force for civic and honest discourse in a time of political and cultural fragmentation. We need a new political language that can minimize internal antipathy and maximize collaboration, and I’d like to contribute to that.