I was thinking, ‘It’s my time to quit school and just play soccer.’ My parents didn’t agree with that, so they sent me off to the States to learn English. I ended up in Southern Oregon with a host family. When I finished high school, I didn’t want to go back to Spain. I felt so comfortable. The conversations went from ‘What would it be if I was to stay here another year?’ to, ‘You can stay here as long as you want.’ All of a sudden, it [went] from having a host family to just having a family.

I went into UP (University of Portland) as an engineering chemist; I’ve always enjoyed science and I had a really good experience doing chemistry in high school. I spent the summer before my senior year in college doing research and I just sat in the lab for hours. [But] it had been two months, almost seven days a week doing things, and the epiphany was… I like to talk to people; I need to have conversations. If this is my life, sitting in a lab doing this, I’m not gonna last. I never had a dire need to go out and teach Spanish. But then it became one of those things where like, ‘Oh wow, I get to come to work and share my culture and my language, and doesn’t take me much to prep and it just becomes more of a fun thing to do and I got paid for it. So then it became kind of evolving and then it got to the point where like, ‘I think I’m somewhat good at this, so let’s actually put some effort into it and actually make things happen.’ Those four years at the University of Portland [are] what made it for me. The decisions I made during those four years [are] the reason why everything has developed in my life.