As I enter into the second half of my college career, I look back on all of the opportunities that have been given to me. When I took advantage of them, some of those doors opened and some of them remained closed. I now realize that those closed doors were available to me as options since life is full of options, but knew that better opportunities lied ahead of me than those doors that crossed my path.
Every year during the first week of school, my college holds a part-time job fair. I as a brand-new freshman wanting to find a job to have spending money as well as to begin saving for the future, I walked into the room that Wednesday not expecting anything out of it. When I left the job fair, I had walked out with an appointment for an interview at a call center that upcoming Friday. I arrived at the interview and after impressing one of the supervisors and even the director of the call center (in which at that time I had no idea he was the director), and although I had absolutely no real work experience at all, they decided to hire me, a shy college freshman who had little knowledge of the real world. When I arrived home after the interview, I checked my email to find the manager of a furniture store I had spoken to at the job fair wanting me to come in for an interview. I always laugh about that day because I always tell people that if I wasn't selling tickets to a dinner theater, I'd be selling furniture. It has been nearly two years and I have opened up a lot and have gotten to know so many amazing people in which they all have their unique stories of their lives.
It is very true that hard work truly pays off. I graduated high school with a very low GPA and that summer before I started college I promised myself that I would redeem myself because I knew that I was capable of doing so much more than how I performed in high school. I looked up my school's honors program and I noticed all of the neat activities such as semi-annual retreats, field trips, and theatre productions that they did, I was determined to keep my GPA up to get admitted into the program now that I finally had a fresh start academically. At the end of fall semester my first year, I applied and got interviewed by the director of the honors program and I was so static when she called me to tell me that I was accepted. Because of the honors program, I was able to go to Washington DC with my honors English 1102 class to do a Model Security Council with students across the country as well as a few international students. That spring I was also given the opportunity to become the director of marketing for my school's Relay for Life team. It was an amazing experience because it the was the first activity that had some relation to what my major was, which is business. This coming fall I hope to audition for their yearly theatre production, which is sponsored and held at a local professional theatre. I had performed for three years in high school, and I'm hoping to make a comeback before I graduate college.
My sophomore year came with a mix of walking towards open and closed doors. With the redeeming of my personal academic standards, I was able to obtain an invitation to join an honor society, in which after a year of meetings that consisted of leadership training as well as a community service project in which I had the opportunity to watch 6th graders working on running their mock business and use their personal finance skills to the test, I was inducted this past spring of my sophomore year. This past year I learned about an organization that focuses on networking and leadership skills for Latinos entering the corporate or professional workforce that was starting on campus. There were not many events that year since their focus was getting established and getting the word out. This past April, they announced on social media that they were recruiting for an executive board for the upcoming school year. I signed up for an interview and attended it. They told me that now that they finally established on campus they could now focus on offering bi-monthly leadership, networking, and other business-related workshops. A few days later I received an email that I was selected as their secretary for next year. I am very excited to see all the opportunities that being a part of this organization will give me, especially since one of their main focuses is networking, and networking is truly the key to success in any field.
However, as stated earlier, there were some closed doors too. For the past two years the theatre production presented by the honors program were plays, but this year they announced that this year's production would be a musical, and when they posted what musical it was, I happy to see that it was a show that I was familiar with since I saw it performed by my musical theatre peers during my sophomore year of high school. I had signed up to audition but backed out the day before auditions were to start because of my difficult courses this past fall as well as my work schedule heavily conflicted with the rehearsal schedule. In the spring I had also applied to two other executive boards, one being the student integrity board and the other for my honor's society executive board since they were in need of several positions. I went to the interview for the student integrity board but two weeks later I received an email stating that I did not make it into the board. As for the honor society executive board, I sent the both the president and the faculty advisor the application on two separate occasions, but I never received a response for an interview. Two weeks ago, I received an email about 3 marketing internship opportunities. I sent my resume to the internship coordinator at school in which by that time one of them, the internship I was most interested in was already taken. As of right now, I have not heard anything from the other two internships.
Looking back at those closed doors, I realized that those doors were not what I needed at that time; I did not need more than I already had on my already full plate as well as the timing not being right. I am confident that sooner or later other doors will open up towards bigger and better opportunities. In the meantime, I am perfectly happy of where I am in my life right now and that I will keep working to pursure my dreams, for everything will fall into place in its perfect timing.
