Okay.

Hi everyone. My name is Re Lumm and I am the CEO

and founder of Grow With Guidance as well

as a senior at Natick High School.

First, I wanna thank everyone who decided to show up today.

You have not only supported yourself and your journey,

but you have also supported this event,

which could not go on without you.

I wanna thank so many people

who have backed me along the way,

but since I don't wanna take up too much

of your time, I'll keep it short.

My parents are a constant in my life, people I can always go

to and rely on for anything I could possibly need.

That includes practice, run throughs of this whole event

and considering my crazy ideas with me next to my sister,

who is such a ray of sunshine in my life.

Whether it's staying up late at night

to help make Instagram posts,

or being the first person to support me,

she's always there cheering me on.

And finally, to my team.

I could not have done any of this without you.

You have been a part of this event since the very beginning

and are here to see it through today.

Last, but definitely not least, a huge thank you

to Social Capital Inc.

Who is the very reason we are all here today.

Early on, I came across their work

and realized that their vision of helping students

and addressing inequalities perfectly matched our

goals at Gwg.

After I reached out over email,

they were incredibly supportive of our ideas.

They encouraged us to apply for their pitch contest,

and when we got in, they matched us

with extremely supportive mentors to practice presentations

and teach us about specific guidelines.

We pitched our project and ultimately received the funding

we needed to host this event for you today.

SEI does this for so many youth groups,

giving us the resources to learn

and grow while keeping us motivated

to improve our communities.

I've learned so much from their guidance

and we are so, so grateful for their belief in us.

Now, moving on to what everyone has been waiting

for Leap today you are going to be able to

learn, explore,

aspire, pursue.

We are going to do that by hearing from an impressive

keynote speaker, followed by four featured guest speakers,

sharing their stories on stage right

after the speeches, we will open up the ice

cream and cookie station.

During this networking period, you'll be able

to meet the mentors personally.

At the end, we will regroup for a few final words

and to announce our Shake Shack Rle winner.

Thank you for being here today.

I'm so glad to get started by inviting our keynote,

Ashley Loftsson to be on stage.

Alright.

Hi guys. My name is Ashley.

Before I get going

and share a little bit more about myself,

I wanna get a better understanding of who's in the room.

So can you raise your hand if you're a freshman

or sophomore in high school?

Amazing. Okay. How many juniors and seniors do we have?

Amazing. How many parents or champions do we have? Love it.

Okay, welcome. I wanna ask you a few questions.

All of you can answer. Raise your hand if you sometimes feel

uncertain or kind of shaky or nervous about the future.

Yep. Raise your hand if you sometimes feel unprepared

for college or next steps.

And raise your hand if you feel like everyone has it all

figured out and you're still trying

to figure it out sometimes.

Okay, so I am also trying to figure it out

and that's why it feels like kind of an honor to be asked

to speak here today, but also kind of silly

because I don't think

that I know much more than anyone else in this room.

So I worked really hard to try

and craft three pieces of advice for all

of you guys about my own career path

and my own journey that I hope will resonate with you guys

and maybe relieve some of the anxiety.

So I wanna share three things,

but the first thing that I'm actually gonna share

is a story about how I got my current job.

Today I work at a tech startup called Lovable,

and I'm a community growth manager.

And this story actually starts when I was 17 years old.

And so the lesson of this story, a thing that I really want

to resonate with you all is the

importance of being good to people.

Because all of us are gonna take different paths.

Some of us will go to college, some of us will maybe not.

Some of us might go to, you know, bigger schools, some

of us might go to smaller schools.

And one thing that's really, really important, no matter

what path you choose

that I have really seen throughout my life,

is the importance of genuinely being good to people.

And so, like I said,

this story begins when I was 17 years old.

When I was 17 years old, I was running summer programs

and workshops for teenage girls on

self-esteem and mental health.

It was super fun. I absolutely loved it.

And when I was in high school,

Facebook was a really big thing.

So I joined this Facebook group of high school entrepreneurs

and I had community with a bunch of other people

who were building really cool things and nonprofits

and companies, and I was a member.

So fast forward to three years later, I'm 20 years old

and I go to this entrepreneurship conference at Brown

University and I meet someone

that I know from the Facebook group whose name is Hailey.

And Hailey is awesome. We're totally hitting it off.

We're so happy to meet in person.

Now over today, or sorry,

now today Hailey has over 30 million likes on TikTok

and is a really famous influencer.

But back in 2017, we were both just 20 years old

and Hailey wasn't famous quite yet.

So Hailey and I meet, we follow each other.

I'm really kind to her. She's really kind to me.

And now fast forward another three years.

I graduate college. I had gone to UMass Amherst.

I really wanted to go to Northeastern University

and my parents said, absolutely not.

You are one of four and you're paying

for college mostly yourself,

so you're gonna wanna go to state school.

So I go to UMass, not super happy about it,

but now as an adult, I don't have any college debt

and it was totally the right choice for me

and the right path, and I feel very grateful for that.

So I graduate college

and I'm in a position where I'm actually able to kind

of mess around and try my own business out.

And so I'm building websites for people

and I'm doing now what I would call like chief of staff work

where I'm kind of like a right hand

to a lot of solo founders.

And I build Haley's first ever website.

And then I kind of keep working with her

and I keep doing growth initiatives

and I help her out with sales

and I help her out with marketing

and I love what she's building.

And ultimately I helped build her business into an over

$2 million business.

And we keep going and we keep building together.

So now fast forward to age 27, I joined a virtual community

that I really, really like for women in business and tech

and media and venture.

It's called Old Girls Club. And I love the founder Mallory.

And so I reach out to Mallory

and I say, Hey, I absolutely love what you're doing.

I'm working in higher education.

I was working at Harvard's Innovation Lab

as a community manager, championing founders

and people who have big ideas

throughout the Harvard ecosystem.

And I said, do you need any extra help?

Because I have some time. I would love to work for you.

Here's the ways that I can contribute

and here's the ways that I helped out Hailey,

and here's the success that we had from working together.

And Mallory says, yep, she agrees to hire me.

She pays me a very good amount of money to freelance

for her, which is a huge deal

because working in higher education,

I'm not making like a tremendous amount

and it's hard to save for bigger life things.

So I have this amazing opportunity that kind

of changes my life and I'm doing really fun work.

And then now I'm 29

and Mallory becomes the head

of community at this really cool, fast growing startup,

the fastest growing startup in Europe.

It's called Lovable. And Mallory says to me, listen,

we've been working together for two years now.

I'm hiring. I would love if you considered

applying to one of the roles on my team.

So I apply seven rounds of interviews later, I get the job

and I'm in a really good career position.

But all of this started because I was good to people

and friendly to people when I was in a Facebook group when

I was 17 years old.

And so I think the lesson here is that it really matters

how you treat other people and people remember.

And I'm gonna give you another quick story

to illustrate kind of the bad side of this,

which is people will also remember if you're mean

for no reason, one

of my best friends in the entire world when I was in high

school, we had a really big kind of

school conflict because we were changing.

Our principal had us change our graduation robes from two

colors separated by gender to just one color.

We all were green and people were really,

really angry about that.

And one guy in particular was bullying my best

friend on Twitter.

And my best friend had a transgender younger brother

and was, she was very supportive

of this like changing this uniform.

Anyway, this one guy was not very happy about it.

He was super mean to my best friend.

And my best friend was of course defending her brother.

And this change, whatever years go by,

my best friend's dad runs a really, really lucrative

and kind of powerful recruiting firm

and has a lot of employees.

And one day a student's name is brought to his attention.

This guy in college apparently crushed it

during like a career fair tabling.

And the company, his employees say, we wanna hire him,

and then they find out where he went to high school.

And the dad of this company, my best friend's dad

finds out that he's from the same hometown.

So he asked my best friend, his daughter

about, do you know this guy?

What's he like? Should I hire him?

My best friend is like, well, he was actually really mean

to, your son bullied me and him on Twitter back years

and years and years ago and that was it.

He didn't get the job. So that's a trickier lesson.

But the point is, the way that you treat people,

if you're good to people, if you're kind to people,

it really, really, really matters.

And I think that it sticks throughout life

because people remember that kind of thing.

So I have two other quick things

that I wanted to just mention.

The second thing that I wanted

to mention is raise your hand if you get a lot of advice.

I feel like young people are always getting a lot of advice

and that's really great because so many people have

so much wisdom to share with you.

And that's really like a gift.

You know, I think if you wanna build a life you like,

it's really important to think critically about whose advice

you actually want to integrate.

I think when I started my career, I was receiving a lot

of advice and some of the advice, one person in particular

that I was receiving advice from

was really not happy in her own life.

And the kind of advice that she was giving me

just wasn't resonating.

And when I looked at her, I realized

that she didn't have the kind of life that I wanted to have.

She didn't have the kind of joy

and happiness that I wanted to cultivate in my life.

And so I say this because sometimes advice is really helpful

and sometimes especially if it's from,

from someone who's on a path that you might not want

for yourself, it's not always super helpful.

So I would encourage all of you

to think really critically about the advice

that you're receiving and think really critically about

what kind of life you wanna build

because you're at such an exciting opportunity

or you have so much agency

and you have so much opportunity ahead of you

and you get to be in the driver's seat

and really think thoughtfully about what you wanna do,

what kind of impact you wanna create, where you wanna go.

And the last thing that I will say is

I've thought a lot about how often life changes so quickly

and how radically different positions you can be in even

just a few weeks apart.

And I thought that something that would be important

to share with you all would be, it's really important

to build self-trust and self-confidence

because life becomes a lot less scary when you figure,

when you trust yourself to figure out your path, right?

All of us are on such different paths

and you're gonna continue to be on different paths

and having trust that you can figure it out,

that you're on the right path

for you is gonna really help in guiding you.

And so what I would suggest is that

you think about the decisions that you're making both small

and large because when you make small decisions

that you like, you start to trust yourself.

And eventually those small decisions become a lot bigger

decisions, right?

And if you like the decisions that you're making,

you have congruency within yourself

and you're able to have a lot of integrity.

And so I think that having that kind of self trust

is really, really important as you navigate all the ups

and downs and confusions and contradictions in life.

I also wanna mention that your priorities obviously change

as you go on, right?

And it's okay that your priorities change.

For a lot of my career, I cared a lot about social impact

and that was really the most important thing

for me when I was looking at jobs

or thinking about college or major.

But now, right now, money is the highest priority

because I wanna be able to buy a house someday and have kids

and do all these things that feel impossible

on a lower salary.

And so think carefully about the decisions

that you're making, think critically about

what your current priorities are,

and it's okay when those priorities shift and change.

I hope that that is helpful because you guys are at a really

important stage and I am sincerely rooting all of you on

and cheering for all of you guys.

Thank you for letting me come share a few things today

and I really hope that it was helpful.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Ashley.

I'll now pass it on to our student introducers.

Hi everyone, my name is Ellie.

I'm a senior at Natick High School.

I have the honor of introducing Kathleen Carer,

a former Boston College admissions officer who now works

as a college counselor.

She'll be sharing crucial advice about college applications.

So please join me in welcoming Kathleen to the podium

As low as it goes.

Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Yes, I'm Kathleen Care.

I'm founder of Care College advising,

and I am director of client Solutions at Folder Wave,

an education technology company.

I've spent more than 20 years working in higher education

and ed tech and I have a pretty unique view

of the college admissions process.

Early in my career, I was working

directly in higher education in

admissions for Boston College.

I was on the admissions side of the table,

reading applications, traveling for recruitment,

and helping support admissions decisions.

Today I work for an EdTech company

and my company provides technology

that supports the admissions process.

We host an online admissions platform that colleges use

to do their admissions review, their ratings

and their decisions.

We're also the platform for

about 400 private colleges, financial aid applications.

So we process millions of student applications

and documents each year.

And a few years ago, I also started working

as a college advisor.

Why? Well,

because my unique perspective in this,

in this process showed me that students

and families I felt needed to understand how to navigate it.

When you're in high school,

the college application process can seem like this very

large, huge, complicated thing.

And somehow you're just supposed

to figure out how to navigate it.

Some of you may have parents who went

through the college admissions process themselves,

but like so many things, it's changed

dramatically in the last 20 to 30 years.

Today, more than ever,

you have information at your fingertips.

You can find advice on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube,

countless websites,

and you can ask AI almost any

question that you can think of.

But here's the problem. More information does not

necessarily mean better information.

Some of what you see online is designed

to sell you something.

Some of it's based on one person's experience

and some of it just may be wrong or outdated.

AI is an amazing tool. I am a data nerd.

I love AI because it helps me process lots of data.

But what it doesn't do is it doesn't replace a person's

understanding of your unique situation

or the context around the advice.

So one thing that I would encourage all of you to do is to

evaluate the advice that you're given.

Common theme. We didn't plan this same theme.

I would encourage you to ask questions, go to the source,

talk to as many people as you can.

Talk to your school counselor.

Talk to college admissions counselors.

So schedule those college rep visits when they come

to your school, when you have a college tour, ask questions.

If you go to a college fair,

they love having students ask them questions

or just email directly the admissions office.

You don't need to figure everything out at once though.

So the advice that I'm gonna give you today is three parts.

Explore, prepare, don't panic

and stay organized.

So first, explore who you are

and what your interests are.

You may already know exactly what you want to study

and that's great.

If you are one of those people, please have grace

with your peers because most do not know

what they want to do.

Some have no idea, and that's okay.

Your job in high school is not necessarily

to figure out your entire career, it's

to learn about yourself and work on self discovery.

Self discovery does not fall from the sky.

It doesn't happen when you're watching YouTube.

It does take work.

You need to think about what classes you enjoy,

what activities make you lose track of time.

What are you curious about?

And don't limit your exploration to just

what happens in school.

Think about outside of school.

If you have a job, if you do sports,

if you volunteer, are you in clubs?

Do you help your family?

Anything that you can think of that helps to highlight

what it is you are actually interested in

or what your strengths are.

And if you find something that you're interested in,

go deeper.

Don't join activities simply

because you think it's gonna look good on

a college application.

Get involved because you actually care about something

and you wanna learn more.

And don't get discouraged if you try

something and you hate it.

Discovering what you don't like is just as valuable

as discovering what you do,

like they become part of your story.

The second piece is preparation.

Especially if you are a junior

or younger, this is a great time to start thinking ahead.

Look at the courses that you are taking

and ask yourself, are you challenging

yourself appropriately?

I did not say, am I taking the most

difficult schedule possible?

Because let me assure you, the goal is not to see

how much stress you can survive.

The goal is to challenge yourself while still being able

to learn and perform well, perform well,

and have a life outside of school.

Junior year grades are important. And that's a full stop.

I'll repeat that. Junior year grades are really important.

And you don't wanna set yourself up for failure.

You wanna showcase that you can grow and progress each year.

If you're thinking about testing standardized tests, a lot

of colleges are starting to reintroduce the requirement

to take standardized tests.

But not all. Researching colleges early is a great way

to determine if that's gonna be a path you have to take.

Think about what matters to you in the college environment.

Do you want a big university, a small college, urban campus,

small town, close to home far away?

The goal is to find colleges that are a good fit for you.

I really push the three fits, the academic fit,

the social cultural fit,

and the financial fit for the parents in the audience.

Again, financial fit.

And here's another really practical piece of advice,

please keep track of what you are doing

when you get to senior year.

That's not the time you wanna say, what did I just do?

For the last three years, you are going to have track all

of the activities, experiences, honors,

awards that you've done.

So keeping a running list now in a Google Doc

or sheet is really helpful.

No one is ever mad at themselves for being organized.

And a question I get a lot is, what should I major in?

And again, if you already know what you wanna major in,

that is great.

I would strongly encourage you though, to continue

to explore that major.

Take classes that support your interest.

Find projects or internships

or other experiences that let you get your hands into it

and learn more about it.

And if you don't know what you want to do,

what you wanna major in, you are not behind.

You are not supposed

to understand your entire professional life at 16

or 17 years old.

Choosing a major is a decision about what you want

to explore next.

It doesn't necessarily mean it's the decision on

what you're going to do for the next 40, 50 years.

And there are times when your interests may not fit into

one neat little box.

Some students love computer science

and psychology, some love business and healthcare.

Personally, when I was in high school,

I loved animals and art.

I told everyone I was going to be a veterinarian.

So in the 11th grade,

I took an afterschool job at a local vet clinic.

I was cleaning cages, restocking.

Being in that environment, it proved

to me I do love animals.

But it also proved that I do not love blood, puss, needles,

stool samples, or seeing animals in distress.

So thankfully in the 11th grade I realized

that while I have pets, I will always have pets.

And I do love animals. That actually wasn't my future.

My interests and strengths lied elsewhere.

And thankfully I recognize that in the 11th grade.

And it can be interesting

to explore these different interests

and strengths that you may have.

Again, it becomes part of your story.

And I would encourage you not to panic.

I've seen how easy it is for students

to feel like college admissions is almost a game

that they have to win.

They're constantly thinking and strategizing.

There are grades, yes, test scores, yes, essays,

deadlines, acceptance rates, rankings.

It it, it's a lot.

But I want you to remember that your college application

really should become an accurate digital portfolio

of what you've been doing that's leading you towards

your next step in your path.

Your path does not have to look like someone else's.

And so if you'll remember at least three things

for me today, it's that you should explore your interests.

Spend time preparing, stay organized, don't panic.

Your job now is simply to take the next step,

keep learning about yourself.

And in the breakout sessions, I encourage you to come by,

stop and ask me some questions.

I'll be over there. Thank you so much everyone.

Hi everyone. My name is Jack Essa.

I'm a senior at Natick High School.

And I'm

Kira. I'm a junior.

We're so excited

to introduce our next speaker, Juan Fletches.

I'm so sorry. Juan is currently a grad student at Tufts

University studying biochem or biomedical engineering

and an army officer.

Sir,

We can't wait for you to hear about

his inspirational journey.

Juan, please come up to the podium.

Hi everyone. How are we doing today? Good, good weekend.

Yeah, just gonna put a timer 'cause I can talk all day long

and I'll not realize that.

So there we go. We start.

So first of all, thank you so much for the introduction.

Thanks you so much for kind

of grabbing all us together here for you guys'.

I'm a big believer on the most valuable things

that you have in life is your time and attention.

That's the one priceless thing that we all can have

and we all can get.

So I'll start with that, right?

I'm here to give you my time and attention

and you're here to give me your time and attention, right?

I'm here to teach you, you're here

to learn a little bit more about that.

And I want you to carry on towards your life, right?

When you get to college or like

when you go past college, right?

If you ever wondering why can I do in a situation is give

you time and attention, that's the

most valuable thing that you have.

So introduce myself a little bit.

I don't wanna take a lot of time,

but as they said,

I'm a graduate student getting my PhD in biomedical

engineering at Tufts University,

and I'm also a United States Army Reserve officer.

I'm an engineer officer. So engineer by duty

and then engineer by education as well.

How did I got here? If I'm being honest

with you, I have no clue.

And that's okay. And that's what I'm saying here, right?

A lot of you might be thinking about life, right?

What am I gonna do after high school?

What am I gonna do after college, right?

What am I supposed to be doing right now?

And I'll tell you, it's okay if you don't know.

Most of the time I don't know

what I'm doing daily basis, right?

I can only control so much, which is your present, right?

Whatever you did in the past, it has already passed.

And then whatever in the future, you can update, right?

The only thing that you can do is act right now.

And with that being said, I see you guys

and I see myself a couple years ago.

What I wanted to make sure that I wanted

to be in a computer science program

and I ended up not clearly, but that's okay.

And as the other speakers have said is, please explore,

please keep that open mentality right?

You don't need to have your life figured out right now.

Raise your hand if your life

is, figure out a hundred percent.

No one, right? Yeah. Not even us up here, right?

We're still learning on a daily basis and that's okay.

Your path is not gonna look like everyone

else's path, right?

Some of you might go in one major, some

of you might take maybe a gap year.

And that's okay. That's fine. So don't worry about it.

Don't compare yourselves against other people.

Don't compare yourself against your brothers,

sisters, friends.

There's a good say that I like,

which is comparison is the teeth of joy.

If you keep comparing yourself to every single other person

around you, you're not gonna be happy.

You're not gonna be where you want to end up being, right?

'cause you always wanna be like someone else, right?

The grass is always greener in the other side.

So the only people that you should actually be comparing

yourself, it's yourself in the past

and yourself in the future.

So tell yourself, what can I do today

to be better from my version in the past?

And what can I do today to hope

and be the person of the future?

Right? What do you want to be?

So every single time that someone asks me, right?

Like, who's your role model?

Who do you wanna be when you grow up?

I tell them I want to be me in 10 years. Right?

And why that? Because you'll never achieve that, right?

Because in 10 years you wanna be like you

in the next 10 years, right?

So you're always gonna keep working hard for it.

And the other thing that I they wanted

to mention is the part of the open-minded, right?

Explore. Just

because you might think right now you know

what your major wants, you know what you wanna major in.

Don't completely seal yourself, right?

Don't seal your vision. Don't be like, oh,

I want to be an engineer.

That's all I'm gonna think right now. Right?

Explore all the paths. Learn by experience.

I think the other speaker did mention that, right?

Experience life first before committing, right?

It's like a relationship.

You can probably ask your parents, right?

How did you know that was gonna be mom, right?

By experience, right? You spend time with people.

So spend time with the things that you want to do in life.

So that comes for jobs, that's come for majors, right?

Try to get internships. Try to get volunteer opportunities.

Doesn't matter if they're paying you or not.

Experience is more valuable than anything in this world,

especially at your age,

especially when you have probably people that care about you

and can support you while you figure out what you're doing.

And then the same point on that one is don't be afraid.

That's one thing that I also love to tell my soldiers

and everyone I meet is don't be afraid.

Right? What's the worst that can happen? Not much, right?

Unless you're doing something very legal, which don't do.

But if you're in college, right?

And you're thinking, man, should I apply to this school

or should I apply to this volunteer should apply

to this internship, just do it.

You have nothing to lose, right?

If you think about it right now, you probably have no job,

no internship, no school, right?

So what's it worth? That can happen.

It's either you don't do anything and you stay on that path

or you give it a try, right?

You spend your, you give your time

and attention to maybe an internship application

or maybe a college application.

And worst case they say, sorry,

maybe not this year, maybe next year.

But best case scenario, they might be like,

yes, you're admitted.

You go who's scholarship? Or Hey, we did like you a lot.

Or maybe, hey, this might not be the right word for you,

but I might know someone who might be willing

to give you a position, right?

And I'm saying all this, 'cause

that was my experience a lot of times, right?

I am a big believer of just try.

And then that's the last thing. I'm already at five minutes.

So that's one of the things I'll leave you

with is just try, okay?

Just like the Nike symbol, right? Just do it. Just do it.

There's nothing you can lose about it, right?

The only thing that you'll lose, if anything might be the

time, but the same time you'll experience right then

by just trying, sometimes you will fail and that's okay.

Just look at those failures

as a learning opportunity, right?

When you're in high school, you might

fail a math test, right?

Well now you learn either how not to study

for the next math test or you learn how

to not take a test the next time.

So try to always see every failure that comes to your life

as a learning opportunity.

And yes, I'll leave you with that.

That way I don't take more time from the other speakers.

But thank you so much. And then I'll be here.

I'm happy to ask any questions about

also scholarships, fellowships.

I forgot to mention, I'm also a Tufts Provost fellow

and many other awards.

But once again, that's simply

because I was always just trying.

That's it. Just did it. Just try.

And then some things work out, some things did not.

So thank you for your time, thank you for your attention

and I'm happy to talk to you guys later.

Thank you for an amazing speech.

And as a reminder, anyone with questions will have a chance

to speak with our mentors directly after the presentations.

My name is Gabby and I'm a senior at Natick High School.

My name is Daniel, I'm also senior at Natick High School.

We are super excited to announce Caroline Miranda,

the speaker who is not only my mom,

but also a driven leader

who built two businesses from the ground up.

Thank you

Guys.

I apologize in advance.

I'm not a public speaker, just a mom.

I just wanted to come and support the kids.

And also just a little bit of love

because this process for applying for colleges is so hard

for parents and for our children, especially as a first

generation here in the us.

When I was a junior, I didn't know what

to do When I was a senior, I didn't know what to do.

So I started with community college,

mass Bay Community College.

After that, I furthered my college education and experience

and my husband and I.

From that, we work together

and we built our businesses together as a family.

A little bit different story than most,

but what we found was a community.

What is a community?

When you find a community, it could be a community

from the country we're from,

it could be a community in town, a community and church.

A community can be one person.

And we found this one person

to give us a little bit of guidance.

And this was 15, 16 years ago

and he's no longer with us,

but we still keep all the guidance that he's given us

so long ago and still help us through life from all

of the decades that we've been working together

and trying to better our lives, better our children's lives,

and hope that we can give everyone around us

as much support as possible.

We had this community and this one person.

So don't forget guys, it's not all about the big things

and the big names and the big colleges

and a bunch of people around you.

Sometimes it's one person that you look up to

and you see, this is how I want to live my future.

And that one person can help you throughout your life,

not one season, several seasons in your life.

And I think that's the most important thing

that sometimes we don't stop to think about.

And I'm very grateful for this small experience

that we've had

and helped us throughout our lifetime, helped me

through college, helped my husband and I through our family

and through all our businesses.

Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Thank you so much. It's

incredible what you've accomplished.

Hi everyone, my name is Ista.

I'm an eighth grader at middle school

at Wilson Middle School.

And I'm Gianna, a senior at Natick High School.

We are so excited to introduce our last speaker,

professor Neko,

who will be speaking about his journey from community

college to MIT.

Please give a warm welcome to Professor Neko.

Thank you so much for this invitation

to speak to you today.

The second one, we know each other very well

and we're both from Columbia, so that's just a,

a coincidence about this.

All of the speakers have really touched upon a lot

of key topics that I have thought about

touch, like talking about.

So I'm trying to think about the best way to not sort

of reiterate the same idea.

So I really wanna focus in on failure

because we think failure is like this scary, bad word.

And it is, but it can also be a part

of the learning process, right?

Failure is something that's you're gonna encounter at any

given point in your life.

You can't avoid it, but you have to learn how

to na navigate it, how to become comfortable with it.

And also how do, like say

that things do happen sometimes for a specific reason.

So I wanna give you that idea just

by telling you a little bit about my story

and just my tra my non traditional trajectory,

I guess in terms of my career development

where I've encountered failure

and we still encounter failure to this day,

but really thinking about, you know, how do we get

to still proceed to with our lives and our goals.

So to give you context,

so right now I'm a prof assistant professor at Tufts

University and the department of Biomedical engineering.

And I've been there for about four years.

Prior to that I was doing what's called the postdoc.

So more extensive training at MIT.

And when I started, when I was in your shoes in high school,

you know, I was getting good grades.

I was, you know, that's the goal of trying

to get good grades so you can go to good college.

The goal here was to get to the best college that you could,

the one that like everybody's trying to get into,

but you have to get into it better.

And so I did, I was going through that process.

I, I was supported by my parents,

which was actually, I'm an only child.

So they were putting a lot of, you know, support for me

to like go into this colleges and be successful.

They're both engineers.

And at that time, at least when I was in your shoes,

the one thing that I just knew I did not want

to do is engineering.

I just wanted to completely steer away

from anything related to engineering.

I just want to do more biological systems and medicine.

Perhaps that turns out, if you fast forward

to today, I'm an engineer.

So, you know, this is one of those things where like,

life is gonna take you in different directions even though

you may not seem to expect it.

So when I was in the shoes, when I was applying to college,

I ended up going to Lehigh University.

And when I first got there, you know, I knew how to study,

I knew how to get good grades, but I just felt

completely lost.

I don't know what it was,

something about the college experience

or not knowing exactly what I wanted to do

with my life long term that I simply just felt lost.

So I, after one semester there, I went up to my parents

and I was like, Hey, I'm out.

I need to drop out of and transfer to state school.

Rutgers, when I was applying in high school, you know,

I had gotten into Rutgers and it was, it was fine.

But you know, that's a state school, you wanna go

to the fancy expensive school.

So when I did told my mom to drop out, she was devastated.

She was like, no, there's no way,

but fine, you're going to state school, that's fine.

I applied and I did not get into state school.

I did not get into Rutgers because of that transition.

So the only decision that I had at

that point was to go to community college.

And I don't know if it's still the same nowadays,

but back in my day going to community college was like,

nobody's gonna go there.

Your, your career is completely ended if you

end up going to community college.

So I did, and I think it was one of those sort of

failures or one of those lessons that you have

to learn in which it turns around

and really sort of brings out something in you

that you had not anticipated

because it was there where I started to get into it.

And you're getting out of this little bubble,

this safety bubble that is high school and college

and the same atmosphere that you're cultured in

and you're going to the real world where,

especially in community college, you're gonna see everything

from all sorts of life

and really sort of gauge what you want to do

and what, what directions you wanna go.

I remember it was one class that I took

where we made cells fluoresce green, they turned,

the cells made just start to flow,

glow green when we put in the microscope.

And I was like, that's the one, that's what it needed

to click in that I wanted to do more biological systems

and biological engineering.

Or at that time I wasn't thinking about engineering,

but biological manipulations, the research that goes

behind the medicine.

So that was like a clicking point

where even though it failed, like my life

and my career was going in

completely the opposite direction.

It was a jumpstarter that needed

because it really sort of clicked in

that I wanted to do this.

So I wanted to investigate more about how

to get to that sort of level.

What is it that you're doing when you're doing research?

What is it that you're doing when you're culturing these

cells and doing biological experiments and so forth.

So from there I did transfer to,

I got my associate's degree.

I went to Rutgers to finish up my,

my full degree in biotechnology.

From there I was working with plants

and doing plant diseases,

which was interesting in terms of research.

But I wanted to do human stuff, right?

Going back to that, that medical sort of oriented.

So I had no idea what grad school was.

I had no idea how you applied.

I thought you went to industry, then you got your masters

and you did this and this,

and turns out that it's not right.

It was just my lack of knowledge that I just didn't know

what the process was.

So one thing that I want you to take away,

at least from this discussion today, is ask

and find out information.

Information is a powerful tool for you to understand, like

what it takes to get to this position that we're seeing here

or what it takes to become a

lawyer, whatever it takes, right?

Everybody's gone through those experiences.

So learning more about that

and being exposed to it is an important facet.

So just by you guys being here today,

you're already two steps ahead

of like what you're supposed to be doing.

So that's great. So I I I just wanna say

and iterate this idea about the, the failure, right?

Because we sometimes encounter this, we still encounter this

to this day, whether you're a executive at any sort of

law firm or anywhere else,

or you're a scientist doing it, one experiment

and it fails, you have to be, become comfortable with that,

that weird feeling in your stomach

and that frustration that just says, oh man, it didn't work.

But I think like, I can make it work.

That is learning, that is part of that sort

of growth that you're building up.

That's sort of the, the resilience

that got brought up earlier about becoming resistant to sort

of not blocking down and, and collapsing when there is

and encounter failure, but rather twisting it around

and trying to figure how I can overcome those situations.

And I think that's a very powerful thing that we're

so afraid of checking the right boxes,

that even if we check, check the wrong box,

you know, it's gonna be okay.

You're gonna learn something other, whether it's

that you hate that internship

or that job that you took, whether it's that you wanna go

and completely pivot your directions into a different,

into a different topic or, or,

or career, it doesn't really matter.

You're gonna learn something along the way.

So the more experiences you have, it is important.

The one thing that I wanna sort of conclude on is this idea

that I, you know, in my profession we write grants,

we write papers, we write all these things,

we do experiments and they fail all the time.

And I get mad, right?

You, you're, you get upset

that when your experiment doesn't work,

when you don't get that grant.

But I don't lose sleep over it, right?

That lasts like a couple, couple hours maybe a day

where I'm just like upset, but then I get over it

and then just move forward.

The things that I still lose sleep over

to this day are when I was in your shoes

and I didn't apply to jobs

because I thought, why would I get that job?

Why would they hire me?

Why would I, so I didn't even apply, applied to college.

I didn't apply to so many universities

because I was like, that's the, that's not for me.

When I got accepted into grad school, I was like, oh,

they emailed the wrong one.

They got this one instead.

But no, so that's a,

that's a very silly way of looking at things.

You have to apply to things, you have to just take a risk.

That's the part of it. Yeah, man, you might not get

that internship now.

You might not, you know, that job that you're looking for,

maybe that's, or you get an offer from one that you didn't,

were so excited, but you're still going

to learn something from those experiences.

So you have to apply. The worst thing you can do

is not apply or try.

You have to become resilient to some of that feeling

of perhaps failure as we call it.

Yeah. I'm happy to rant more about this

and talk to you guys more about my personal experience

after the, the, when we sit down.

But again, thank you for, for this opportunity.

And then more importantly, just keep at it.

You guys are already two steps ahead,

so just keep on trucking in terms of meeting your goals

and learning more experiences

and taking chances when you can't take a chance.

Thanks.

Thank you all for these incredible stories.

You have not only motivated the youth here,

but given them such meaningful advice for their futures.

We are now going to move onto the networking

and socializing part of the event.

Our speakers will be located

in different corners of the room.

As you can see, there are signs up with their name.

And I encourage you to go to all of them

and ask at least one question.

As everyone has said, asking is the best way

to learn new information

and learn about what you wanna do in your future.

I wanna take this moment to thank our speakers dedicating

their time to this event today.

First, Ashley, I appreciate your immediate support so much.

You were on board a minute after I pitched the event.

Your positive attitude is contagious

and your presence completely elevated.

Leap today. This is for you

and next to Kathleen.

Thank you so much. You're someone who always goes out

of her way to support others,

even rescheduling your own commitments to be here today.

We are so grateful for you

and Juan.

I have always loved your sense of humor

and easygoing personality.

Even in the five minute conversation we had, I learned

so much from you and just knew I had to invite you to leave.

This is for you.

And to Carolina.

Thank you so much for jumping in so readily

to support this event and stepping up to speak today.

Your enthusiasm means the world to us. This is for you.

And finally, to Professor Neko,

when I heard you speak about your journey,

I knew it was exactly what students needed to hear.

Thank you for giving your email to a random student

who approached you after your presentation.

And thank you for being here today.