Hi there! I am Gertrude Abarentos, a bilingual storyteller, social scientist, and an occasional visual artist and baker.

My most recent works focused on environmental conservation, public health, migration, crime, and culture.

I grew up in Antipolo, Philippines, a quiet, mountainous city bordering the nation’s capital, in a house sustained by my Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) father, my housewife mother, and three other siblings, and where I started as a visual artist at the young age of 13 to afford extracurriculars.

Then, I attended Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Manila, which is described as the “poor man’s university” for providing education to students with limited resources. By the time I entered the college through their BA Communication Research program, a major that provides the best in communication, social science research methods, and data analysis realms, a Republic Act (10931) that provided underprivileged Filipino students, such as myself, the opportunity to pursue higher education through free tuition was signed into law. Thanks to this, I managed to publish with a team and individually, a paper on how low socioeconomic status facilitates poor academic motivation, taking into account generational and situational poverty, how family sexual communication relates to sexual outcomes, and the internalized oppression among Filipino immigrants in New York, and co-lead communication efforts about Philippines’ issue on mining, plastic pollution, and gender equality without the economic hassles that coexist with being a humanities student.

In mid-2021, a time of heightened AAPI hate, I immigrated to New York to be with my overseas family. Because of the pandemic that transitioned classes from face-to-face to virtual, I was able to finish my first Bachelor’s degree, Summa Cum Laude with the best in quantitative research and 2nd best policy research award. During my senior year, despite my foreign papers, I was able to land multiple internships that provided transformational experience, mentorship, and noteworthy achievements valuable to building up a recent immigrant:

  • A research investigation that I co-led as Research and Data Analytics Intern at the New York State Attorney General’s Office helped the office send 28 cease and desist letters to illegal online firearm sellers. Subsequently, it provided informational support to a landmark lawsuit against national gun distributors. This helps keep guns off New York streets, more so, from the wrong hands.
  • Developed a full communication system for the Innovation team of the world’s largest conservation non-profit, The Nature Conservancy.
  • Helped the largest gun violence prevention in America, Everytown for Gun Safety, streamline their important statistics update and gun violence research.