Angelica Jaramillo
Angelica Jaramillo’s father never finished college. Her mother never finished high school. Among her four siblings, the furthest anyone got was an associate’s degree. Nobody in the family had ever earned a bachelor’s, let alone a graduate degree. Her dad’s dream was to hear their last name called across a graduation stage.
This May, it happens.
Half the family wants a ticket. Her uncle has been asking for two years. “Uncle Russ, you have a whole baseball team,” she told him. Her dad has told everyone he knows: My daughter goes to USC.
The youngest of five, she grew up in a lower-income family in Montclair, California, before moving to Texas at 12 because it was more affordable. She put herself through her undergraduate degree in Radiologic Technology by bartending, doing clinicals, and selling tamales from behind the bar to cover textbooks. After graduating, she went to work at UT Southwestern Medical Center, working two hospital jobs through COVID to save enough to buy a house.
There is also a photo of Angelica as a preschooler holding a board that reads: When I grow up, I want to be a scientist. On the first day of her USC Viterbi DEN class, she recreated it with a dry erase board and a Trojan hat, except this time it read: When I grow up, I want to be a biomedical engineer.
She only applied to one graduate school. This May, she will receive her Master’s in Medical Imaging and Imaging Informatics from the USC Viterbi Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Go Big or Go Home
“I never in my entire life expected to be able to get in,” she says. “We grew up pretty poor. I didn’t think I was smart enough.”
Her supervisor at the hospital saw something she didn’t and pushed her to apply. She had looked at other schools offering something similar, but none came close to USC’s level, it was the only one that was both the right caliber and fully remote. She had met with associate professor Brent Liu, the program’s faculty lead, a year and a half before applying to make sure it was right for her.
When the acceptance came, she was at work. She messaged her boss in tears. He sent her home for the rest of the day. She called her parents because she couldn’t wait to tell them in person. Her father cried. Now that name was going to USC.
1,500 Miles Away
Angelica completed her degree remotely through USC Viterbi’s Distance Education Network, holding down a full-time job in Dallas while attending classes two time zones behind her California classmates. She rearranged her work schedule to catch one class live at lunch and watch the second after her shift. Group projects meant negotiating time zones: I can’t do anything after 7 PST. That’s 9 o’clock here. She took it one class at a time, over three years. One semester she tried two simultaneously. “I almost died,” she says.
What kept her going was Liu. He was teaching enterprise PACS systems in class at the exact moment Angelica was helping implement one at UT Southwestern, learning what she was building in real time. Her favorite moment came when she pulled 3D visualizations of radiation therapy directly from DICOM images using code she had taught herself and presented it live in class.
“Wait, are you doing this live?” Liu asked. “Where did you get these pictures?”
“I pulled them from the image itself.”
He clapped. She was the only student he did that for.
Liu’s assessment is unambiguous: “Angelica and DEN were a match made in heaven. Her hard work and perseverance and desire to learn married with our DEN courses and resources is the reason we all do this. It has been a pleasure teaching and mentoring her.”
She flew to campus to attend one class in person and was told they had never seen a DEN student do this. Her mom flew in with her and walked every inch of campus taking pictures of her daughter. “I’m allowed to be here,” Angelica remembers thinking. “I go to this school.”
The DEN program made it possible, but being remote came with tradeoffs. Events would land in her USC inbox that looked genuinely exciting, and she was 1,500 miles away. She wishes USC had a satellite presence in Texas so DEN students could gather for events, build connections, and feel a little less separated from the community they belong to.
Create your own opportunities
She is now Manager of Program Operations at UT Southwestern, a role she largely created herself. The degree opened doors she hadn’t imagined: she can code, and she’s building apps, including a tool for rad techs that overlays 3D bone models on a patient to practice X-ray positioning. When colleagues ask how she built such an unconventional career, her answer is always the same. “There are other options out there,” she says. “You just have to look, and sometimes create your own.”
Balancing a full-time job and a graduate degree over three years required more than good scheduling. It required an outlet. Hers is weightlifting. She got into it during her undergraduate years by signing up for a weightlifting class. She now has a home gym and hits it regularly, partly because the endorphins are the one reliable reset after a long day of work and study. She also hikes, games and reads to decompress. Her favorite video game series is Dragon Age, the kind of sprawling RPG involving swords and magic that she loves enough to have cosplayed as one of her characters for Halloween.
The Path to Happiness via a PhD?
Now she’s looking at a PhD. After a long day deep in budgets and capital planning, she once told Liu that he looked genuinely happy at work. She asked if it was real or just a performance for class. He told her it was completely real, that he gets to research whatever interests him, teach people who actually want to be there, and follow his curiosity wherever it leads. “That’s my goal,” she says. “To be able to pursue something I’m passionate about and just enjoy going to work every day.”Â
A PhD, and perhaps a path toward research and teaching, is how she gets there. Liu and BME PhD advisor William Yang have both encouraged her, telling her that students who know what the real world looks like are exactly who doctoral programs need. The only obstacle is that USC doesn’t offer a DEN PhD.Â
She would have to move to California. When she told her dad, he didn’t hesitate: “I guess I have to start looking for a house in California.” Her parents would follow her there, close enough to finally be in the same state as that graduation stage they have been dreaming about for years.
Published on May 12th, 2026
Last updated on May 12th, 2026