George Alvarenga was born a few short blocks from Hostos Community College at Lincoln Hospital and was raised and still lives on Dyckman Street in the Inwood section of Manhattan. George was raised by a mother from the Dominican Republic and a father from El Salvador and in his upbringing the diversity of his home revealed the contradictions, the inspired ideologies and the staunch independence of each of his parents. George felt engulfed by the passions of his magnanimous mother, who always seemed to be brimming with the vibrancy of her ancestry, which flows through her like the Caribbean Sea. George’s father on the other hand was a man grounded in the reality of revolution and the full understanding of the atrocities that man could do to man, simply because he had seen much of those tragedies occur during the Civil War that waged in El Salvador, just prior to his emigration to the United States. George says that he considers that all of his altruistic and artistic aspirations genesis from his mother, because as a child he would spend time with her while she wrote poetry and she would recite verses to him. Her political fervor was another quality that was engrained in George as he slowly became aware of how the world functioned and all of its idiosyncrasies.
George attended A. Philip Randolph High School in West Harlem and when he graduated he decided to attend Hostos Community College. He began his Hostos experience in the spring of 2009 and started to take classes, but had to leave school for a year, because of personal issues that arose in his life. After recovering from many of those issues and revamping his life, George returned to Hostos in the spring of 2011 and began to immerse himself slowly back into college life by taking two classes at first and then each semester increasing the number of classes he was taking. George eventually won an award for writing an essay on Women in Gender Studies at Honors Convocation and was told that night, by a close friend, who also won an award, Paola Garcia that he should both join the Hostos Student Leadership Academy and participate in the theater program. George responded by asking what the Hostos Student Leadership Academy is.
In the summer of 2012 George interviewed and was accepted into the Hostos Emerging Leaders Program, where he excelled by volunteering at numerous activities in a variety of locales and he eventually became invested in the idea of addressing his political desires by taking on a lead role in the efforts of the Leadership Academy to be recognized at the 2012 National Model United Nations in Washington, D.C., where he and a group of nine others represented Italy and won Honorable Mention. George followed up his efforts in Washington, D.C. with a strong showing, representing the Central American country of Costa Rica, with seven other students at the 2013 National Model United Nations in New York.
George also started to explore his artistic side by taking a theater class in the summer in 2012 and was inspired to get more involved in the acting community at Hostos, because of the inspirational influence of Professor Angel Morales and so George enrolled in an Acting class in the fall, which led to him being cast as Caliban in the show Rough Magic by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, which will premiere at Hostos Community College on April 25th and will travel to be a part of the Scotland Fringe Festival in August of 2013.
George has improved his GPA over the course of the least few semesters and was promoted to the Hostos Student Ambassador program. He has applied to both Columbia University and Yale University for the fall of 2013 to complete his Bachelor’s Degree. George has a desire study and eventually to work at either the United Nations or as a Foreign Service Officer at the State Department. George is also passionate about literature and hopes to be able to share the great writing of the world with his family and friends. He has even considered becoming a Professor of Literature one day.