Meet the Summer Prefects: Bella Sanchez (’23)

We continue to meet the prefects for the upcoming Summer Program in California! Next up is Bella Sanchez, a junior on the California campus.

Bella is a Californian native, born and bred in La Mesa, 20 minutes east of downtown San Diego. Her family discovered Thomas Aquinas College through the dense network of TAC alumni cobwebbed across Southern California, and that influence led her older sister to the College in 2014. “We would come visit her all the time,” Bella says, “and even though I was pretty young, I fell in love with the school — watching the students walk to class with their books, surrounded by the beauty of the campus. It looked like such a peaceful, beautiful college experience.” 

When it was time to for Bella to discern her college plans, it was a fairly simple process. “I only applied to TAC — I hadn’t even thought of anywhere else!” She has been a laughing, smiling presence on campus ever since.

Given Bella’s enthusiasm for TAC, it may come as a surprise that she never went on the Summer Program as a high schooler. “I had come to campus so often visiting my sister, and later my brother, and sitting in on their classes, that I didn’t need any more encouragement — I just came!” But when she was invited to serve as a prefect for the 2020 Summer Program, she seized the opportunity to fill that lacuna in her TAC experience. Since then, she has been a regular among the prefects.

“I’m really excited to do it again,” laughs Bella. “It doesn’t get old!” In particular, Bella loves the off-campus excursions, especially the trip to Santa Barbara. “It’s great bonding time with the attendees,” she remarks, and then recalls with a grin, “There may even be a gelato-shop where we usually stop …” 

Bella’s thinking is sound. Given the intensity of the reading and classes — which, like good exercise, are both invigorating and exhausting — Summer Program attendees need a good break to relax and get to know each other outside of the classroom. And what better way to do that than over gelato, shaded by palm trees, treated to the quiet music of the surf and sand?

As she reaches the end of her junior year, Bella has begun, like many of her friends, to think about the future. “I want to take a year and live somewhere in Europe, and use all my free time to travel as much as I possibly can,” she says. “Eventually, though, I would love to get into interior design.” Fortunately, Bella’s longer-term career aspiration complements her yearning to see Europe, where she will have countless churches, palaces, and museums from whence to draw inspiration.

But that grand tour, however, exciting, remains dim in the haze of the future. In the much more immediate meantime, Bella looks forward to meeting this year’s Summer Program attendees and discussing all things good, true, and beautiful — perhaps over a scoop or two of gelato …