For as long as I can remember, my parents have always strived to give my brother and me the best possible life so that we wouldn't suffer the hardships they endured. That's why my dad decided to come to this country in search of better opportunities, and my mom worked twice as hard to be present in our lives while we were growing up. When I got here, I noticed how stressed my dad was because of his job; all he thinks about is work. Every time we go out to dinner or somewhere, I try to talk to him and he ignores me, and when I complain, he tells me he was thinking about work. He is currently sending money to Mexico, both to pay for my brother's college and to help his parents and sister. My grandparents are very old now. My grandmother is retired, but she still has to go to doctor's appointments for certain health problems, which my dad ends up covering. My grandfather is still working, but he has never been able to be successful or stay in jobs for long due to his advanced age. Now my dad is even more stressed out, and he is working all week without rest. This has affected his health, as he suffers from back and hip problems due to an accident that happened to him years ago at work. My dad worries a lot about money and always reminds me that the career I chose does not pay as well as an accountant's, which stresses me out because he always tells me this at least once a week. Moving on to my financial education, my teacher taught me many things about economics, but there were two specific topics that stayed with me. The very first things that my teacher taught us at the beginning of the semester was about scarcity, that's about the fundamental economic problem where limited resources like time, money, labor, or raw materials that cannot satisfy unlimited human wants. It forces choices, and creates "opportunity costs." I believe that my major, zoology, does relate with financial education as it also involves scarcity and opportunity cost; in the field and even in classes I will learn about all the resources humanity is using and that are non-renovable, making species go extinct or forced them to learn to interact with humans so they might get a chance to survive. The opportunity costs are dangerous in my field of study, but that doesn't mean we cannot do anything about our actions as society.

My family comes from a small town in Veracruz. Back then, both my mom and dad didn’t have much money. My mom got pregnant at a young age, and they both had to drop out of school. They both managed to finish high school, but they never went back to school to pursue a college degree. As I grew up, I remember how my parents would tell my brother and I how important it was for us to get good grades and go to college, since they never had that opportunity. I remember that my parents struggled financially, and once they even got into so much debt that they had to sell the car my dad used to work as an Uber driver at night. I developed a deep fear of failure. I felt that I had to work very hard to make my parents proud, or that if I chose a career that didn’t make me a lot of money, my parents would be disappointed in me. When I started high school, I didn’t know what I wanted, or even if I wanted to go to college to study something I wouldn’t enjoy. I heard stories about people who studied what they wanted and ended up working at fast-food restaurants; I didn’t want my future to look like that, since it was clear they weren’t happy with their jobs. They told me with great passion what they had studied, but they simply didn’t have the money or the opportunities to make their dreams come true. A few years ago, I met a woman ten years older than me. She told me how her parents didn’t support the majors she wanted to study either, but that didn’t stop her from pursuing her dreams , if it made her happy, that was all that mattered; she told me something I still remember: “Sometimes wealth isn’t just about money. I’d rather be ‘poor’ but be doing something I know I love and doing something to change the world, that’s what wealth means to me.” Thanks to her, I realized that my career path wasn't so bad, and that sometimes it's okay to want something that others don't. I started looking for schools to attend and developed a passion for going to college. To this day, I feel that if I don’t manage to go to college, everything my parents struggled for in their youth will have been in vain, and that all the hardship I’ve endured trying to fulfill my dreams will have been for nothing if money is what stops me from achieving them. I want to let the world know about the secrets in animals, their adaptations that makes some of them, the perfect ambush predators, and discover, how is it, that some of them have been able to survive massive extinctions with little to no changes in their anatomy. And maybe in the future not so far from now, I'll be able to develop medicine that's capable of curing mortal diseases in humans.

For me, my sense of purpose is to help others. Ever since I was little, I’ve felt that I’m here to help people get through difficult times at specific moments in their lives, and once that’s over, either they or I move on from their lives. My life in Mexico is a bit hazy. Even though I lived there for 13 years, for some reason, the memories from my childhood were the most vivid and colorful. I clearly remember the problems my family faced; I remember seeing my parents struggle to pay off debts, and how my dad had several accidents in his works, but they never gave up on making my brother and me happy; Above all, my mom was the one who made the greatest effort to be present in our lives. I remember her at almost all my school events, the dances, and the fairs. I remember my dad coming home very late from work. I know he worked very hard to support our family, but he wasn’t as present in my life as I would have liked. And even today, I see my mother working at a job she clearly doesn’t like, but my father won’t let her work in another field that might interest her; every time I think about this, I can’t help but tell myself, “That’s not the life I want”; I want to do something that makes me feel like I’m doing something good for the planet and that makes me happy.

My family comes from a small town in Veracruz. Back then, both my mom and dad didn’t have much money. My mom got pregnant at a young age, and they both had to drop out of school. They both managed to finish high school, but they never went back to school to pursue a college degree. As I grew up, I remember how my parents would tell my brother and I how important it was for us to get good grades and go to college, since they never had that opportunity. I remember that my parents struggled financially, and once they even got into so much debt that they had to sell the car my dad used to work as an Uber driver at night. I developed a deep fear of failure. I felt that I had to work very hard to make my parents proud, or that if I chose a career that didn’t make me a lot of money, my parents would be disappointed in me. When I started high school, I didn’t know what I wanted, or even if I wanted to go to college to study something I wouldn’t enjoy. I heard stories about people who studied what they wanted and ended up working at fast-food restaurants; I didn’t want my future to look like that, since it was clear they weren’t happy with their jobs. They told me with great passion what they had studied, but they simply didn’t have the money or the opportunities to make their dreams come true. A few years ago, I met a woman ten years older than me. She told me how her parents didn’t support the majors she wanted to study either, but that didn’t stop her from pursuing her dreams , if it made her happy, that was all that mattered; she told me something I still remember: “Sometimes wealth isn’t just about money. I’d rather be ‘poor’ but be doing something I know I love and doing something to change the world, that’s what wealth means to me.” Thanks to her, I realized that my career path wasn't so bad, and that sometimes it's okay to want something that others don't. I started looking for schools to attend and developed a passion for going to college. To this day, I feel that if I don’t manage to go to college, everything my parents struggled for in their youth will have been in vain, and that all the hardship I’ve endured trying to fulfill my dreams will have been for nothing if money is what stops me from achieving them. (Translated by DeepL Translate)

In Mexico, Conservation and love for animals is something that you often don't see, what you do see is animal violence, in some places u see trafficking of exotic species. Sadly, even the own government doesn't perform any activities or plans to take care of wildlife, and endemic species. My passion for animals began when I saw all that suffering, I understood that I'd probably be killed if I didn't left the country, so I did; now here, in Oregon, I see how animals and people can coexist, but we still need to do some changes to allow animals to enjoy life as much as we do. I used to watch programs, like National Geographic, about how animals were able to survive in the most dangerous places, from desserts where rain only arrives once a year, to jungles where most of the year is raining. They all evolved and adapted to occupy every inch of space, from the smallest ant to the now extinct sauropods. Species diversity is something fantastic, how they all occupy their special place in this big world, all animals are necessary for something in this life, but most of us humans, still don't understand it. When civilizations started and conquistation was "popular" we began seeing animals as just products, we hunted hundreds of species until extinction, or erased their habitat just to create pretty big houses. I believe we still can do something to change our path to destruction, invent something that allows wildlife and humans to coexist, as we were meant to from the very beginning of humanity. I want to start to create ideas of eco tourism where there exists a safe interaction, so both sides don't get afflicted, I'm still young and don't know a lot about conservation, that's why I want to go to college and learn about the fantastic things in the animal kingdom, and what we can do to preserve it. My major will be Zoology, and I want to focus mostly on reptiles and mammals, but to be honest, all animals are important to me, from insects, to living dinosaurs, the birds. I want to let the world know about the secrets in animals, their adaptations that makes some of them, the perfect ambush predators, and discover, how is it, that some of them have been able to survive massive extinctions with little to no changes in their anatomy. And maybe in a future not so far from know, I'll be able to develop medicine that's capable of curing mortal diseases in humans.