And in a single B L I N K, it all came to an end. I ask myself, how two years happened so HASTILY? I vividly remember Randy Scherer, from High Tech High, giving us the first introduction to the “Design Thinking” process, or the day we skyped at 4:00am when the documentary was due. In some way or another, every learning experience and memory that we’ve crafted during our time in the IA has made the past two years the best of my school life.

But not only has the IA enriched our knowledge, challenged our beliefs, and widened our skill set, in a way we’ve also collaborated by leaving a piece of who we are. One of the proudest things, I feel, we all leave behind is our outstanding culture, or like they call it in Mambo: COOL-ture. The unique personalities we possess make us different, a piece of each one has cleaved off to create the WONDERFUL culture we leave with Corey and the IA. We leave behind everything from the crazy imagination and creativity of DD to PB’s deep and critical thinking skills to the logical analysis of Gonchi.  The IA has taught me that with a strong culture--a culture that unites team, inspires people, and builds ownership--you can go FAR. Today what sets certain companies apart is their CULTURE; this is a new competitive advantage, according to a recent article published by the Kellogg School of Management.

The COOL-TURE we’ve created in the IA resembles much more than CREATIVITY, AUTONOMY, and INNOVATION. To me, the IA culture reflects trust & challenge, taking initiative, and embracing failures, three key aspects that I’ve HARVESTED during my two years in the IA, and will carry forever.

The IA has taught me that trust is more about CHALLENGING yourself and other people than simply believing that people will do their work. Once you’ve built TRUST amongst your family, friends, and co-workers you can challenge and question them to help them flourish, and you can also feel warmth when they do the same because you know they want to see you grow. Once you have the certainty, confidence, and credibility you will challenge and let other challenge you.

Everyone knows that the last two years in high school are some of the biggest STRESS periods a young adult faces. Around the time of the documentary I hit that wall, and I lived, breathed, and thought about stress. I dragged stress around with me, it became contagious, and it began to ruin the class culture. Long story short, during the feedback sessions my peers CHALLENGED me to control my stress, to plan more in the short term and to exercise. Even though I haven’t fully learned to control stress, I feel that I’ve grown immensely in that area and I thank them for it.

I hope that in my next stop, Providence College and job, I will have the TRUST we had in the IA, where I could CHALLENGE my peers and mentor, and they could also challenge me.

In today’s current world everything is in high demand, certain jobs, excellent students, etc. Now that we are entering college we will be side by side with students who are as great or even better than we are. So how do we compete in this fast paced and ambitious world? Leaders and top executives in companies are looking for people that are constantly STRIVING TO ADD VALUE. This is another important lesson I treasure from my IA experience. Not only will you contribute more when you take initiative, but you will learn more. Especially in college, we will be granted tons of opportunities and resources and if we don’t seek out or take advantage of them, they will never be discovered or will never come to us.

If you look into the manual for success, many people don’t see failure as a step, instead they NEGLECT failure. But what many don’t know is that FAILURE is a huge part of success, and those at the top are people who’ve learned to embrace it. When I entered, I was another sheep; I REJECTED failure.

I remember way back when doing the documentary, Gisella and I had to delete our entire script because it was so biased. I couldn’t accept that all that work was going to be lost; we had spent so much time doing it. However, we had to restart in order to create an outstanding documentary. The first time it was hard to admit we had FAILED, but then this happened again and it was much easier to restart the script the third time. We now saw it as a motivator and a way to push us to create something even better. If it wasn’t for the documentary I wouldn’t have learned how to COPE with FAILURE, so I’m grateful I went through that experience.

I now know that to succeed you need to EMBRACE your mistakes, and that the more FAILURES you have, the more you’ll learn and the better your work will be. Seeing FAILURE as a barrier won’t allow you to reach success and it won’t make you a better, person, learner, or leader. The fear of being imperfect holds you back.

We are all very excellent SHEEP. We’ve been absorbed by the system, and we jump the hoops as the come.  We don’t love it, but we’ve never QUESTION it because we don’t know any better. 

Two years ago, when we were presented the IA, many were MOVED by the idea, it was something DIFFERENT and we were INSPIRED by it. However, when it was time to decide amongst the programs the school has to offer, many of us questioned this new system. For the first time we were CHALLENGING a system and critically thinking about it. We were scared about universities and how they would PERCEIVE this new program. We were already thinking about the next hoop, without even thinking of the PURPOSE first. The problem is that we are excellent sheep; since we saw that the current system was providing the OUTCOMES we wanted to achieve; there was no reason why we should SHIFT gears. 

During most of my time at school I was a SHEEP myself. I was accustomed to follow the herd. I was working hard to get good grades, so that when the time came I would be able to apply to prestigious colleges. I had already picked up my dream college without even knowing what majors it had, or even worse, what I wanted to study: I just knew I wanted a BIG name and cool campus. However, my thoughts completely changed after a year in the IA.

There is no doubt that at first I CHALLENGED the IA myself, but even so I found it AMAZING because it reinforced the idea of finding PURPOSE and a PASSION, something I didn’t have, so I decided to join. Like I’ve mentioned in my previous blog, the IA has allowed me to find myself (my strengths and weaknesses), and who I want to become. Through the IA, I began to realize that I didn’t have a CLEAR purpose why I was working so hard to get good grades, or why I wanted to go to elite schools. In the system I was blinded, and I had no sense of direction. 

When I entered the IA, the EXPERIENCE and FOCUS was totally different to the one I had been following. For the first time, I was genuinely passionate about learning. SUCCESS wasn’t defined by the grades, but by the hard work and relevant projects that enriched the classrooms learning. Instead of continuing to value big name schools and city campuses with no particular purpose, I began to value learning experience, innovative environments, real world experience, collaboration with experts, and more. I began to VALUE things that ENRICHED my education and learning more than my curriculum. 

When it was time to apply to university my vision gave a 360-DEGREE TURN, from NYU’s to TCU’s. I went from a vision of elite schools to a vision of project and experience based learning schools. I began to search for schools that had some of the things I VALUED from the IA like: real world experience, relevant projects, collaboration and internship opportunities, interdisciplinary courses/majors, small classrooms, and so on. When I finished creating my college list I knew exactly what I wanted to GET for my higher education and from the different institutions and their programs. 

After a long ride of applications and admissions decisions I have decided to attend PROVIDENCE COLLEGE. Something I truly value from the IA is the PERSONALIZED learning offered. Through a small classroom size I’ve been able to build close relationships with my cohort and mentor, who have given me feedback, and made me grow as a person. I see the value in constant feedback and I want that in my higher education. PC has SMALL CLASSROOM SIZES, and students THERE have told me how close they are to their professors and how small classrooms allow them to stay engaged. Then, another thing I valued from PC is that they have great connections, so students are able to learn from experts. Not only does the school provide you with internship opportunities, but also when professors know you really well they find you too offer you internship and working opportunities. I know students who have been able to intern at firms in NYC and Boston in their freshmen year because of their  professors reaching out to them. In the IA I’ve seen the VALUE of real world experiences, so I’m looking into taking this opportunity and getting some fieldwork since the beginning. Finally, PC also strives to help students FIND A PASSION in their careers. In one of the courses you take as finance major, experts come to give talks about what they do and how there life is. A current student at PC told me that he really enjoyed this class because he was able to see what his career was going to entail upon graduation, thus give him an idea if this was something he wanted to continue pursuing.

Thanks to the opportunity I've been presented, a new program at our school, I've learned to challenge and evaluate the hoops before jumping right into them. Even though I'm a sheep in some ascots of my life I feel that i've learned when to break apart from the herd to step back, grain perspective, and ask myself if there is a purpose to what I'm doing. There are great things about the system, but there are also something we need to be skeptical about. This two years have been extremely rewarding and I hope that my experience at PC continues enriching my life. 

The IA has SHAPED me into who I am, it has allowed me to EXPERIMENT, and DISCOVER things I’m passionate about. Before the IA I was doing work for the sake of doing it, but here I’ve learned to do work that is PURPOSEFUL, work that has VALUE to me. If I wasn’t motivated to do it, then it wasn’t beautiful work. Here I realized that marketing was my perfect match. The IA gave me the opportunity to explore marketing from different perspectives, so I was able to analyze it skeptically. Finally, I was able to intern in a revered marketing firm where I realized this was the road I wanted to follow. 

When we did the economics documentary and I entered a completely DIFFERENT world—to the one I had envisioned for myself all these years—I was blown away. I fell in love with MICROFINANCE, and found this NUMERICAL world interesting. Through research, interviews, and dinner table conversations with my dad I discovered another area I was passionate about, so when the Math IA’s came around, I had no doubt about doing it on microfinance. For this project, I ended up creating a mini version of a program that determines the probability of default of a client, my model worked with only four variables. Through the IA I got the opportunity to deeply explore microfinance, and see the more numerical side to it, and I concluded that even with those horrible numbers I still enjoyed it.  The math used in microfinance is completely different to the one in school, there is no trigonometry, every calculation makes sense, and all the numbers COMBINED can give you tons of information of a client. For me it was the people and working with entrepreneur’s HUNGRY to innovate that truly awaked this passion.

After a month of working in a bank and exploring the NUMERICAL world I can say that it was been a wonderful experience, nothing like I imagined. I never thought that I was a numbers person, but after processing invoices with the accountants, analyzing the 17 Peruvian banks and their performance in 2013-2014, and just experiencing the financial atmosphere, I can say that I want to continue learning more about this. As the accountants thought me how they control every transaction I started to make CONNECTIONS with Blendz, I though about how we could implement their system in our business. These connection where telling me something, if my brain was processing everything that I learned so deeply it meant that I was INTERESTED in it. Even though we did some of the basics in accounting it did gave me an idea of what it meant to be one, and some of the jobs that I could have upon college graduation.   

Usually we do internships alone, but this time I took on the internship with two of my friends, Gonchi and Pedro. The fact that they were both there truly ENRICHED my experience. I not only learned from the environment, listening to the long expert talks, processing transactions, and working with excel, but also from my friends who where a step ahead of me in FINANCE. They would clear up my doubts and during the talks with the experts they would ADD VALUABLE insights and questions to the conversation. 

We had little ACTION, lots of CONTENT, and many MEETINGS, but I was still able to take a lot from this experience. The purpose of the internship, for me, was to learn about finance AND accounting, but also to FIGURE OUT if this was something I was passionate about. After finishing with the internship, I’ve realized that I might want to minor in finance, aside from being interesting; I find it extremely vital for any job I might encounter in the future.

I know, thanks to the experience I had in the internship, I’ve been able to give my future a better DIRECTION. Therefore, now that I enter college I have a better PERCEPTION of who I am, and what I want to get from my studies.