Fernando Pena

Fernando Peña is an enrollment management leader with significant experience in domestic undergraduate and graduate admission, and international admission. Born and raised in the Boyle Heights community of Los Angeles, Mr. Peña’s passion for admission and outreach stems from his own personal experience as a first-generation student, and his participation in student-initiated outreach, EOP, and TRIO programming. A true advocate for underrepresented students, Mr. Peña’s admissions career and impact spans for over a decade, holding a record of successful outreach and recruitment programming efforts, diversity recruitment, and successful faculty and university wide partnerships.

He currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Admissions and Recruitment at San Francisco State University. In this role, he provides leadership and management to the 38 professional staff members in the Undergraduate Admissions and Recruitment team. As the university’s chief admission officer, he provides oversight of a comprehensive portfolio of programs that develops a pipeline of prospective undergraduate applicants, including recruitment activities that target high school seniors and community college students. He is also responsible for developing, organizing, and overseeing all aspects of the evaluation and admission processes for domestic and international first-time freshman and transfer students, including policies and procedures that optimize efficiency of the review and processing of undergraduate applications for admission and applicants’ transfer coursework.

Prior to his role at SF State, he served in various Director capacities. Most recently at Claremont Graduate University, and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where he managed admissions and recruitment for highly selective undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Prior to his role at UCLA, Mr. Peña spent six years at the University of Southern California (USC) where he managed undergraduate and graduate admissions for the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He began his admissions career at UC Santa Barbara as a high school outreach counselor where he executed recruitment and outreach strategies for all assigned territories in Southern California.

Mr. Peña holds a master’s degree in Postsecondary Administration and Student Affairs from the University of Southern California, and a bachelor’s degree in Chicana and Chicano Studies with a minor in Education and Applied Psychology from UC Santa Barbara. He is an active member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), the Western Association for College Admission Counseling (WACAC), and the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU).