Yesenia Aguilar Silvan is a first-generation student majoring in Psychology and double minoring in Latin American Studies and Chicana/o Studies. Her experience as a first-generation immigrant and her upbringing in a low-income city in Los Angeles, has sparked her research interest in community based approaches and minority mental health. She is a Psychology Departmental Scholar and is completing her honors thesis on the barriers that arise during the implementation of evidence-based treatments in a community setting. Her research argues that a client’s demographics will be predictive of the rise in emergent life events or what therapist refer to as “crisis of the week”. She argues that these barriers need to be addressed to better the mental health services for communities of color. For her honors thesis, Yesenia is leading a team of coders to develop a manual and reliably code the rise of emergent life events. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a post-bac position as a research lab coordinator and apply to Clinical Psychology Ph.D. programs in the near future.