SFSU Psychology student Frankie Sanchez receives CSU Trustees’ Award
The first-generation student plans to build a career helping people navigate grief, loss and the end of life
Frankie Sanchez returned to college in his late 30s with a clear idea of the career path he planned to pursue. He wanted to become the kind of mental health professional who had once helped his family.
Now, after earning a 4.0 grade point average at San Francisco State University and graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Sanchez has received one of the California State University’s highest student honors: the CSU Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement.
The award is presented each year to CSU students who demonstrate superior academic performance, significant personal accomplishments, community service and financial need.
He will put his scholarship toward the next chapter of his education at SFSU. Sanchez has been admitted to the University’s selective Master of Science in Clinical Psychology program, where he will prepare to become a licensed marriage and family therapist.
It is a career choice rooted in experience.
Sanchez grew up facing significant financial, emotional and structural barriers, including a disability and the death of a parent.
Sanchez sought mental health care himself following these experiences and credits his own therapist with helping him recover and eventually find his way back to higher education.
His experiences with grief have also shaped the work he wants to do.
In 2023, Sanchez lost a dear friend to suicide after a struggle with depression. Sanchez has written about the guilt he experienced afterward and the signs of his friend’s distress that became clear to him only in retrospect.
The experience ultimately pushed Sanchez to reconsider what he wanted to do with his life.
“In the stillness following his death, a sense of clarity emerged: I could no longer put off my own purpose,” he wrote in his award submission essay.
Sanchez left his previous career and devoted himself to studying psychology and working with people experiencing grief, trauma and mental health crises.
At SFSU, that commitment quickly became visible in the classroom. Along with maintaining a perfect GPA, Sanchez was invited as an undergraduate to guest lecture on end-of-life issues and facilitate weekly discussions with students studying the psychology of death and dying.
Faculty members unanimously endorsed his admission to SFSU’s Clinical Psychology graduate program.
Professor Shuyi Liu describes Sanchez as a student who brings intellectual curiosity to his studies while connecting psychological theory and research to larger cultural, social and clinical questions.
“Interpersonally, Mr. Sanchez is warm, respectful and reflective,” Liu wrote in support of his nomination for the Trustees’ Award. “He brings emotional maturity, cultural sensitivity and humility to his interactions, qualities ... essential for success in the mental health field.”
Professor David Gard, director of SFSU’s Motivation and Emotion Research Lab, put Sanchez’s academic record in perspective.
“As I think back over the 20 plus years teaching ... Frankie is among the strongest that I can remember,” Gard wrote.
Much of Sanchez’s education has taken place outside the classroom, as well.
He spent a year working as a crisis counselor with San Francisco Suicide Prevention, talking with people experiencing some of the most difficult moments of their lives. Sanchez said the experience showed him how shame, silence and stigma can compound suffering and gave him a deeper understanding of how trauma and suicidality are experienced across cultures and identities.
In 2025, he began volunteering as a grief support group facilitator with San Francisco Village and later trained to work with survivors of suicide loss. He also worked as a counselor at Edgewood Center, a residential mental health facility for teenagers who have experienced trauma and other serious challenges.
And as an end-of-life doula, Sanchez has trained to provide companionship and emotional and spiritual support to people approaching death and to their families and circles of care. The work can involve everything from helping someone reflect on their life and create a legacy project to supporting caregivers and simply being present during a person’s final days.
Those experiences have given Sanchez a specific goal for what comes after graduate school.
He plans to work as a mental health therapist in hospice and palliative care, with a particular interest in providing identity-affirming care to LGBTQIA+ people and their loved ones.
Sanchez is especially interested in the role of chosen family at the end of life. When health care systems or others fail to recognize those relationships, he says, people can find themselves separated from the people who matter most at precisely the moment they need them.
He eventually hopes to create a community-based organization that supports chosen families as they navigate death, complex loss and disenfranchised grief; grief that may not be fully acknowledged or supported by society.
The CSU Trustees’ Award will help Sanchez continue that work at SFSU, where he will move from studying Psychology as an undergraduate to training as a clinician.
His destination is already in sight.
“We all have a right to face the end of life in the care and companionship of our loved ones,” Sanchez wrote, “regardless of whether those relationships fit the expectations of our culture.”
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