Name: Meilyn Guas-Perez
House: MET Pilot
Meilyn Guas-Perez has been a resident of the Met Pilot Scholarship House for three years. She is a student at Santa Fe College and majors in astronomy. She will be attending Arizona State University in the Fall of 2021 for Aerospace Engineering in Astronautics. Her favorite things to do in Gainesville include stargazing, coffee runs with friends, leisure reading, and swimming.
Meilyn was born in Cuba and primarily grew up in Key West. From a young age, she was fascinated with Star Wars and Star Trek, and eventually, her love for those TV shows translated to a love for space. She fell in love with the solar system and the idea that we live in an expansive galaxy somehow contained in a nebula, a nebula that is part of a chain of nebulas that creates our unfathomable universe. The depth and endless possibility there is in space exploration are what draws her to the subject. One day Meilyn hopes to work as a systems engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. She dreams of contributing to furthering their knowledge of Mars and pushing the boundaries of the unknown; her ultimate goal is to be a part of the team that sends the first humans to Mars.
Meilyn is heavily involved in SSF and attributes her success to her involvement in this community. She found out about the Southern Scholarship Foundation through her success coach at the organization “Take Stock In Children.” Meilyn always had big dreams but was always concerned about how she could afford her education. Thankfully, she had support from counselors in middle and high school that led her here. Now, she is the treasurer of the Met Pilot Scholarship House and a housemate loved by many. What she loves most about SSF is the support system it provides. There is always someone that she can lean on, regardless of the circumstance. Building strong connections with other people in this community is one of her greatest accomplishments and has grown her beyond what she could have imagined. Not only has she gotten the unique opportunity to hang out with her best friends every day, but she had also formed life-long friendships.
