CAN YOU REMEMBER A TIME WHEN YOU HAVE SHOWN

YOUR ENTERPRISING SIDE?

Javier Fernández Jiménez

• Have you ever had one of those friends who truly understand you and with whom you have lots of fun while learning so much about life? Aleida and I could consider ourselves as one of those. We have been friends for years. We are quite similar and when we get together we become one.

• It was such a strange period of our lives. We were kicking off the school year and we found ourselves extremely confused by the circumstances. Both of us would chat overnight about our future and our worries. Everything revolved around this question: What should we study? We wanted answers and we wanted them immediately. Medicine, architecture, theater, business, etc. Nothing seemed to make sense. We talked a lot about this to our school psychologist as well as watched various famous talks on YouTube. I remember one of them was about how important it was to have a mentor in our lives who we can learn from. So the following day we tried to find some mentors and ended up in our philosophy teacher’s office. We were there for approximately two hours and I personally learned a lot about life from what he told us. We definitely had a very tiresome month of overthinking.

• I do not remember the circumstance when we came up with the idea, but we decided we should go out and try to find a job. We wanted experience since that is the first thing people ask for when hiring potential employees. We longed to feel productive and wanted other responsibilities apart from studying. We also thought we would be ideal for companies that are trying to reach the youngest people. You do not want to have a publicist who is middle aged when you are selling products to adolescences. All of those reasons made us lose every kind of embarrassment we had left and turn our words into actions.

• We both took the same bus after school and walked around downtown. We went to the auditorium, the city hall and various major stores. We were looking for something related to the publicity of the store but we were also interested in jobs such as a store clerk. “No, no, no” that is what everything we heard that day truly meant. Only one of the people we talked to seemed to understand us and only one of the stores we went to gave us an application to fill in.

• When we came back home, we told our parents. They were definitely not happy about the idea. However, after reflecting on the topic, we put ourselves in their place and understood their point of view.

• We know it is good to be self-motivated and to have our own initiative. It is a part of ourselves we are not going to change. After all, we both learned that right now our responsibility in life is to study as hard as we can. Once we went through this troubling time, we realized life is about making choices and not everything comes easily.