College Experiences Helping Marketing Analyst At IMT Residential Succeed

I went into Cal Poly with two ideas: that I was really good at business and politics. I planned to figure out which one I was more interested in.

I ended up interning for the city of Los Angeles with Mayor Eric Garcetti and also served as a representative for my local neighborhood council. With all that political experience, I was burnt out before I even started college. So, I decided to put politics on the back burner and focus on business.

I got into Cal Poly's business program and found myself interested in finance and entrepreneurship. It's like a decision tree: figure out your top two or three interests, and then try them. I took the hardest undergraduate finance class at Cal Poly. I did well, but it also stressed me out to the point of burnout again.

I realized that if I get too invested and burnt out by something too stressful, it's probably not a good fit for the long term. It might be something you can do for a short project or time span.

I'd use writing my book as an example. I worked countless hours, probably thousands, and it felt like three years. Because of that, I don't plan on writing a second book. Many people ask when I'm working on my next one, but they don't realize the work involved. I have a new respect for authors who dedicate their careers to writing; it's like a muscle.

In college, I kept following my top interests and fully committed to them. By the time I chose entrepreneurship, I had become an officer of the entrepreneur club and a TA for the senior project class. Everyone in the entrepreneurship field knew me, and I worked with every teacher.

I also interned in the Cal Poly Hothouse, an accelerator program, for the summer. I basically made my entire identity around entrepreneurship. This led to my first internship, which became my job after college. They knew me because I was so involved in the field and constantly meeting people interested in startups. When they needed to hire someone familiar with and passionate about startups, they wanted to give me the opportunity.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more time and energy you put into something, the more results you get. It doesn't matter if entrepreneurship is your final focus. We create our own luck by being open to opportunities related to our interests.

The best way to be ready for opportunities is to dedicate as much time, effort, and energy as possible to those interests. College helped me understand this is how life works, as I created my own career path without even realizing it until years later. Looking back, it makes sense how I went from point A to D, but I couldn't have predicted it when I was at point A.

It only makes sense in retrospect, seeing a career path that I couldn't have foreseen in college, like becoming an author. Things like that happen in life, and the best way to manifest them is to be open to them in the first place.