The first sound I remember clearly from my childhood is a clank, bullets hitting the side of a train instead of a person. I was four years old, stuck behind a stopped train in Matamoros, Mexico, while Cartel del Golfo gunmen exchanged fire nearby. Within weeks, my family packed what we could carry and moved back to Texas for good. I did not realize then that the fear would travel with me. By elementary school, that fear had become an anxiety I could not explain or control. I cried before school, in the car, and sometimes after arriving, despite nothing being wrong in the classroom. I attended therapy through elementary school, middle school, and into my freshman year of high school. There was no single breakthrough that made everything better. I spent years learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings without letting them dictate my decisions. In middle school, sports became an outlet, and every practice and race gave me another chance to push through discomfort. Throughout those years, my parents worked to build a stable life for our family. My father grew up working in the fields alongside my grandfather before becoming a welding instructor, turning physical labor into a skill he could pass on. My mother worked at a salon, building relationships with the same clients year after year while helping keep our household steady. Watching their sacrifices taught me that stability is built through discipline, responsibility, and persistence. At seventeen, I decided to build something of my own. I started a vintage clothing business, sourcing pieces from thrift stores around Brownsville and Los Fresnos and reselling them online. I surpassed one thousand sales and earned close to ten thousand dollars in a single month. But I mistook earning money for knowing how to manage it. My poor financial decisions contributed to a difficult situation for my family. It was humbling to realize that something I had worked hard to build could become a source of stress for the people I wanted to help. I learned that earning money and protecting it are different skills, and success means little without responsibility. That experience changed how I viewed entrepreneurship. When a close friend was struggling financially and could not work long hours because he needed to care for his family, I taught him how to start a similar reselling business. Watching him work toward improving his family’s situation gave me a sense of purpose that no sales milestone ever had. I began to understand that a business’s value is not measured only by what it earns, but by what it makes possible for others. My mistakes taught me financial responsibility, while helping my friend showed me why that knowledge was worth sharing. Today, I am a business student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the first in my family to pursue a degree at this level. I have learned that resilience does not mean never struggling. It means showing up, taking responsibility when things go wrong, and finding a way forward when the outcome is uncertain. I am no longer the child who cried at the school entrance, unsure how to face the day. After completing my degree, I want to pursue commercial real estate development and invest in the Rio Grande Valley, the region that raised me and gave my family a place to rebuild. I want to create spaces where local businesses can grow, entrepreneurs can get their start, and jobs can give families greater financial stability. I know how much an opportunity can change a person’s direction, and I want to create more in the community that shaped mine. My goal is not simply to build wealth for myself, but to make a lasting contribution to the Valley, just as I helped my friend take his first steps toward building a business. Growing up taught me that circumstances can change in an instant, often beyond our control. I could not control what happened when I was four, and I cannot undo my financial mistakes as an entrepreneur. What I can control is what I learn from those experiences and what I choose to build because of them. I want to use my education and future career to create opportunities for Rio Grande Valley families and businesses, the community that helped my family rebuild. I cannot change where my story began, but I can help shape what comes next.

When I say I am a first generation Mexican American college student, it means I carry more than a title. It means I carry a family that survived fields, fire, and fear just to give me the chance to sit in a classroom. My dad spent his childhood working cotton and corn fields beside my grandfather, long before he had a family of his own to protect. That inheritance of hard work followed my family across the border, through a night I will never forget, and into the life we rebuilt in Texas. I remember the clank. That is the sound bullets make when they hit a train car instead of flesh, a sound I heard for the first time when I was four years old, stuck behind a stopped train while Cartel del Golfo gunmen exchanged fire nearby in Matamoros, Mexico. We were not the target, but that did not make it less terrifying. When my family reached a safer part of the city, we found buses set on fire and turned sideways across the streets, a barricade the cartel had built to keep the military out. It was the week Tony Tormenta was hunted down and killed, and for a few days, my hometown looked like a war zone. Within weeks, my family packed what we could carry and moved back to Texas for good. That fear did not stay behind in Matamoros. It followed me into elementary school as anxiety I could not explain at the time, moments where ordinary mornings felt unsafe for reasons I could not name. But it also planted a refusal to let instability be the final word on my life. Watching my parents rebuild our lives from almost nothing in Texas, the same determination my dad learned in those fields, showed me that resilience was the real inheritance my family had to offer me. My job became turning that inheritance into something more. At seventeen, I started a vintage clothing business, sourcing pieces from thrift stores around Brownsville and Los Fresnos and reselling them online. It grew fast enough that I once made close to ten thousand dollars in a single month, and I also mismanaged that money badly enough to put my own family in a rough financial spot shortly after. That mistake is exactly why I am studying small business and entrepreneurship at UTRGV now instead of relying only on instinct. That lesson became something I could hand to someone else. A close friend of mine was watching his family struggle financially, unable to work long hours because he had to help care for them at home. I showed him how to source and resell vintage clothing the way I had, and how to manage the money responsibly this time, so he could build income around his family instead of choosing between the two. Watching him rebuild his family's stability meant more to me than any profit I ever made. That is the kind of entrepreneur I want to be, one who hands other people in my community the tools to build their own future. Being a first generation Mexican American college student means I turn ambush, fire, and fields into a business degree instead of just another survival story. It means the tools I build will lift not only my own family, but the people around me still fighting the same fights mine did. I still think about that clank sometimes, and I remind myself I am no longer just trying to get past the danger. I am building something the danger never got to touch.

Math has always been more than numbers and formulas to me, it's a language of logic, patterns, and endless possibility. I love that it challenges me to think critically, look at a problem from more than one angle, and find a precise, workable answer. Every equation is a puzzle, and solving one gives me the same sense of accomplishment every time, no matter how many times I've done it before. What fascinates me most about math is that it's universal. No matter where you are, two plus two will always equal four. It doesn't change based on where you grew up, what language you speak, or what circumstances you're navigating, which is part of why I trust it so much. Whether it's pricing an item for resale, tracking a budget, or projecting where a business could be in five years, math is the constant that lets me plan with confidence instead of guessing. As someone building a vintage clothing resale business while going back to school as an adult learner, I use math every single day in ways that are anything but abstract. I calculate cost versus resale value before I buy a single item. I track income against expenses to know exactly how much I can reinvest. I run numbers on which opportunities are actually worth my time versus which ones just sound good. My love for math has fueled my drive toward entrepreneurship and, eventually, commercial real estate development, where every decision comes down to numbers that have to work in the real world, not just on paper. Math has taught me perseverance, discipline, and creativity. It sharpens the way I think and pushes me to keep looking for a better, more efficient way to solve a problem, even when the first approach doesn't work. It's not just something I studied in school, it's something I rely on to build a better future for myself and for the community I plan to invest back into. That's why I love math.