If Santiago, on the eighty-fourth fishless day of The Old Man and the Sea, kept rowing without pretending to win, what should a business measure when odds are against it without lying to the numbers? For me, the answer begins with sustainability: a business cannot call itself successful if its profits depend on ignoring environmental costs. I ask this whenever I encounter a project that must outlast short-term profit. My father’s education ended in Xatinap, Guatemala, with a lost notebook; he couldn’t afford another, failed the term, and returned to cutting milpa, cornfields ruled by seasons, not semesters. My mother’s dream of college was derailed by tuition, so she worked relentlessly to make my attendance at college possible. Observing their perseverance made human capital tangible and revealed a gap between potential and opportunity. Observing the land that shaped my father’s childhood also made natural capital tangible: soil, water, and climate are not abstract resources, but conditions that determine whether families can work, learn, and survive. Therefore, I used my entrepreneurial instinct to engineer opportunity for those confronting similar barriers, founding Puentexas to widen education and access through business, economics, and public policy. In my field, sustainability must be a priority because management decisions determine how resources are used, priced, wasted, and protected. Puentexas became my first exposure to business fundamentals—not for profit, not in a classroom, but for social impact. It began as a STEM tutoring project for Houston middle schoolers; as I absorbed lessons on human capital and market inefficiencies, it grew into a global initiative drawing 68 volunteers across 14 time zones. Through this hands-on approach, we provided educational material to over 5,500 students and $45K in resources. That experience taught me that impact can scale without always consuming more physical resources. A platform can reduce barriers while also reducing waste, travel, and duplication. These experiences illustrate the kind of economics student I am—one who embraces a learn-by-doing philosophy. Studying applied economics and computer science will immerse me in the questions sustainability requires: how firms price externalities, how consumers respond to incentives, and how founders build models that are profitable without being extractive. My education will expand the principles I intend to uphold as a founder committed to benefiting humanity and reducing environmental impact. Continuing the economics, globalization, and public policy research I began at Rice and Harvard’s Kennedy School, I hope to pursue similar questions in my profession. I want to explore how business models can narrow the gap between potential and opportunity while recognizing that environmental damage often falls hardest on communities with the fewest resources to adapt. In the future, I plan to lead conversations about climate risk, circular business models, clean technology, and environmental accountability. In my future profession, I’ll collaborate across disciplines to create tools that make opportunity reachable while reducing environmental harm: using AI to cut inefficiency, designing programs with lower material waste, and supporting projects that serve communities without damaging the land beneath them. For me, economics is where sustainability must become more than a slogan. It is where my parents’ unfinished educations, my father’s milpa, and Santiago’s relentless rowing meet the same question: what do we owe the future? If Santiago had his skiff, I have my ventures—and in my profession, I will row with better instruments, more connections, and more hands on the oars. My goal is to build ventures that make hidden environmental costs visible, reduce them, and prove that economic opportunity and environmental responsibility can move in the same direction.

In Manhattan, “Houston” is not my city. It is a street pronounced “HOW-sten,” named after a completely different history. That subtle difference taught me how easily people can share the same letters yet misunderstand each other’s meaning. That is the type of bridge I hoped to build when I founded my nonprofit, Puentexas — “puente” means bridge in Spanish. I wanted to translate between students and opportunities, volunteers and missions, local efforts and international impact. More than anything, I wanted to serve children whose access to education and opportunity was limited not by talent, but by circumstance. My inspiration came from both my background and my faith. As the son of Hispanic heritage, I understood how opportunity often depends on whether someone is willing to open a door. As a Christian, I also believe service cannot remain an idea or a phrase spoken in comfort. “Freely received, freely given” became a responsibility for me. Prayer and Scripture helped me see leadership not as stewardship, using whatever gifts I had been given to multiply chances for others. The challenge emerged quickly during one of Puentexas’s first planning discussions on Slack. In Nigeria, research suggested our lessons needed to work on low bandwidth. In Korea, developers were excited about creating an AI-first platform. In Texas, teammates wanted on-the-ground momentum and immediate community action. Everyone was right, just from different perspectives. At first, the disagreement felt like a fracture. If each group pursued its own vision, our mission could splinter before it ever served the students we hoped to reach. I realized my role as founder was not simply to choose the loudest idea or the most technologically impressive one. It was to listen carefully, translate between perspectives, and anchor everyone to the deeper mission... which is expanding access to opportunity for children worldwide. So I adapted our proposals around a shared principle, to respect constraints while maximizing impact. Low-bandwidth needs did not have to compete with innovation. Local action did not have to conflict with international reach. Differences stopped being obstacles and became features. Engineers learned from tutors, graduates learned from high schoolers, and I learned from everyone. That experience changed my understanding of service. I used to think service meant bringing a solution to people in need. Puentexas taught me that any service starts with humility. It needs listening before designing, adapting before leading, and remembering that the people closest to a problem often understand it best. Leadership, in that perspective, is not about being the person with every answer. It is about building a bridge sturdy enough for other people’s gifts to cross. It also deepened my faith. I stopped seeing faith as something private or separate from my work. Instead, I began to understand faith as the foundation that gives service its purpose and leadership its restraint. Without humility, service can become pride. Without action, belief can become empty. Puentexas taught me that honoring God through service means turning conviction into tangible work for others. The impact of Puentexas was not only in the programs we built, but in the way we built them: across countries, disciplines, and perspectives, with a shared commitment to children who deserved greater access to opportunity. Through that process, I learned that meaningful service does not always begin with certainty. Sometimes it begins with translation, with the willingness to hear different voices, bridge different worlds, and keep grinding toward a mission larger than yourself. Personal Portfolio: jonathan-gamez.com Puentexas Website: puentexas.org

When I think about my father's story, one thing stands out more than others—his scars. As he taught me to tie my shoelaces, pressure-wash our driveway, or thread bungee cords through grommets, I remember tracing the thin lines on his hands. His scars intimidate me; they symbolize a lifetime of daring, manual labor—carrying fifty-pound tarp rolls two at a time, welding seams until his palms blistered, teetering on swaying trailers for hours, for months, for years. Scars are earned. Starting a tarp shop as an undocumented immigrant means facing countless reasons to play it safe. Who expects a man in vinyl-dust jeans to step off the loading dock into an office, facing plant managers, their eyes on his scarred arms before his words? But my father would. He is the kind of man who would walk into that office wearing a dusty polo and speaking accented English, negotiating the tarps he once imagined. One day, a carrier called about a torn tarp; by 6 a.m., we were there—ladder strapped to the pickup between idling trailers. He climbed, re-stitched the tear, and after wolfing a Salvadoran pupusa in the cab, refused to charge for the trip. That’s how you earn scars. I don’t have scars like his. He didn’t attend college; when he was my age, he barely knew it existed. He made his way sewing tarps and welding seams. Sometimes he thinks he has nothing to offer a college-bound student, but he does. He taught me to sit across from people who never expected me there and to bet on myself. Reading Smith, Arendt, or Tocqueville, I don’t skim; I trace arguments as I traced his scars until I see what holds. Writing on Rodrik’s Globalization Trilemma, I don’t stop at one draft; I rewrite—three times, seven—as long as it takes. With professors and executives, I offer my view and admit when I’m wrong. Like my father, the point isn’t impressing others; it’s that I grow. My father doesn’t realize he taught me how to think, but he did. The habits he practiced—the ones that gave him scars—are ways of thinking, of being, of living. How you weld a tarp seam is how you approach anything: reading a book, writing a paper, or risking an honest question when unsure. I don’t have his scars, but I’m blessed to have his way of thinking.