MESA Program Director

Edrina Rashidi joined Mission College as the Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement (MESA) Program Director in 2015.  She also serves as the club advisor for Mission College’s Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) student chapter. 

Previously, Edrina coordinated college and tutoring programming in the East Side Union High School District through the UC Santa Cruz Educational Partnership Center program, San Jose Cal-SOAP (California Student Opportunity and Access Program).  Additionally, she has served as part of the finance team at a tech startup, been a math tutor, and taught at an after-school program for educationally and economically disadvantaged K-12 students.

As first generation, both to immigrate to the US and to earn a bachelor’s degree, Edrina is passionate about creating educational equity and poverty alleviation, especially through STEM education.  She encourages her students to have resilience and to develop a global perspective on how their efforts in STEM can change the world.  As someone who studied abroad in three countries during college and graduate school, she hopes to provide her students similar opportunities for growth.

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Education

• Doctorate of Education of Education in Higher Education Leadership
  • San Francisco State University (in progress)
• Master of Arts in History with Latin American emphasis
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Bachelor of Arts in Humanities with European Studies emphasis, Minor in Spanish
  • San Jose State University

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Fast Facts

Edrina has lived on four continents and fluently speaks three languages (with a functional understanding of three more).

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Favorite Quote

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

-Theodore Roosevelt