I’ve spent most of my life working outside under a car/truck or inside a garage doing the same. My grandfather was a truck driver and work on vehicles. It’s been a dream of mine for many years to do this for a living. When I was younger, I play baseball up until I was around 8 or so, then that is when I decided that the extra activities involved working a cars or trucks. My grandfather owned his own trucking company for years and in those years, I took a liking to semis because that is what I helped him do. In the many years that passed I continued to do the same thing, if I wasn’t in school, I was working on something in a garage. When I was 15 years old, I was hired by a diesel mechanic who specialized in race car motors, he built engines. To this day I still work with him learning everything I can from him. My love for working on cars also became I enjoyed building motors and enhancing them. In 2020 which was the same year I got my job, my grandfather was so excited to see me take on this trade and see it through, learning everything I could either from him, my boss or just from researching it online and reading about it. December 2020 took a toll on myself and my family when my grandfather passed away at 56 years old due to COVID. I inherited his Chevy pickup that needed a motor that my boss and I were in the middle of building, we didn’t get it done before he passed but we had it running less than 2 months later. In May 2021 I was accepted to Universal Technical Institute, I was only a Junior in high school at that time. I knew that he would have been so proud to watch me go to this school. My mom and I went and toured the school a couple months later and the first thing I said when I arrived is that if Papa was alive, he probably would have come down and went to school with me, he enjoyed learning different things. My plans when I graduate from UTI is come back to my hometown and start my own auto/diesel shop and eventually a few years down the road buy a few semis and run a trucking company in honor of my grandfather, because if he was here that is what we would have done. I want to be able to have this shop and hopefully teach young kids in high school the lesson of working and how to achieve goals. I want to be the business that I can bring high school kids to work at that do our work base learning program. I have done this program for 2 year now and it has taught me so much about growing up and working. I know things don’t always work out like we want them to, but this is my goal and I have the support of my mother who wants to see me succeed in every aspect of live. Being raised by a single mother, she has always paved a way for me to do whatever I wanted to do. She believes in this and knows that she will help me open this business and make my dreams come true.

Years ago I set forth for my career in automotive, but in 2020 it put a different perspective on it. My grandfather who I learned most of what I know about vehicles from had a heart attack and he had to come live with me and my mom after his heart surgery. My mother worked a lot and my papa and I spent a lot of time together, he couldn't drive so I drove him around and he would come out to my job and help and teach me as we went along, we were able to spend lots of time together in 2020 due to me being out of school due to COVID and him being out of work due to his surgery. Even after he went back to work middle of he year he came out to my job when he could and we continued what we had started, he kept teaching. In December 2020, 5 months before I got accepted to UTI (my dream school) my papa passed away from COVID. It broke me, now more than ever I want to show him that I can continue what we started. Everything I do will have his memory attached to it.