After the worst of the COVID pandemic, in 2022, a gnawing anxiety tormented Yousif Gaboola as he walked the halls of Valhalla High School in El Cajon. Painfully shy, he said he felt as though “everybody was looking at me all at once.”
It was a problem to solve, to be sure. Gaboola, who was fascinated by psychology, read about a technique called “exposure therapy.” Little by little, he purposefully placed himself in situations where he had to talk to people, meet new faces, and talk about himself. The idea was to face his fears, in small doses, again and again, until those fears receded in the rearview mirror. Before long, Gaboola found himself running for Homecoming King – circulating among his classmates as never before. Another student got the title, but Gaboola won just the same.
The anecdote speaks volumes about Gaboola, a 2024 Grossmont College graduate who will study mathematics at UC San Diego this fall. It points to his persistence, his analytical mind, his ability to recognize problems and seek solutions … and of course, to his courage.
“I wanted to test myself,” Gaboola said of the episode back in high school. “I wanted to push myself just a little bit more, so I could crush this fear once and for all.”
Gaboola has faced his share of challenges over his 19 years. Born in Iraq, he lived with his parents and younger brother in Telskuf, a small village north of Mosul, until he turned four. That’s when his parents decided to leave the country for Turkey before joining extended family in El Cajon in 2009. The growing family welcomed another brother, and the family settled in for about ten years. Then a move to New Mexico upended high school life for Gaboola, although about a year later the family returned to El Cajon.
Nearing the end of high school, Gaboola said a lot of his friends discouraged him from attending community college right after graduation. Better to go directly to a four-year institution, they said. But Gaboola didn’t buy it. Besides, he didn’t have the money to go directly to a university, and his high school grades were not the greatest.
At about the time he enrolled at Grossmont College in the fall of 2022, Gaboola intended to pursue a degree in computer science because he thought doing so would secure a lucrative career. But he also had a natural affinity for studying mathematics, and he loved working on hard problems. “I wanted to do math,” he said of his decision that fall to major in math. “I just wanted to commit to it because I was worried that if I continued with computer science, I would be kind of unhappy because I was just doing it for the money.” So, he decided to pursue something he truly loved.Over the next year and a half, he immersed himself in calculus, linear algebra, differential equations and discrete mathematics. He relished academic conversations he had with fellow classmates, and in his spare time he explored The Millennium Prize Problems https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/, an international program based at The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts that challenges mathematicians the world over to tackle the most confounding mathematical problems known to humanity.
As he heads to UCSD, Gaboola says he wants to pursue a career as a mathematics professor, immersing himself in teaching and research – and maybe eventually establishing an academic career at Oxford University in England. He says he’s not sure where a career in mathematics will take him, but he’ll always be drawn to working on hard problems – expanding his mind and making a lasting intellectual impact in his field.
Gaboola’s love of teaching began at Grossmont, where his math professor, Corey Manchester, encouraged him to tutor classmates through the college’s Math and Science Center.
Gaboola said he gets a ton of satisfaction seeing students who he’s tutored light up when they understand a complicated math concept or problem. “The look on their faces when they finally understand what that 30-minute lecture was that their professor gave them … is just amazing,” he said. “I love it.”
As he’s helped students at Grossmont, he’s reminded of the many people on campus who helped him chart his own path toward graduation and a college career at UCSD – from his interactions early on with Grossmont’s “First Year Experience” https://www.grossmont.edu/student-support/fye/ support program for new students, to his personal relationships with faculty and staff.
“The community here wants you to succeed,” he said of Grossmont College’s culture of student support. “Professors go out of their way to do office hours with you. I always had the feeling that the community college wanted you to do well, and it gave you the resources to do that. That was an eye opener for me, and it made me feel like I was in the right place.”
As he heads to UCSD in just a few weeks, Gaboola says he’s grateful for the journey he’s taken at Grossmont College, which helped lay the foundation for a boy from a small village in Iraq to become a future mathematics professor.