Students Write - Prof. Martin's Class: Manuel

Finding the Way in Aldine
by Manuel Soto

Manuel, with his parents, at his graduation from MacArthur High School in June, 2017

In my Aldine community, many of the Latino families there push their sons and daughters to become greater than they are. Taking a year off school immediately gives off the impression that you don’t want to study anymore. My family is Hispanic and they seemed disappointed because they wanted to brag to my tios and tias about my success and I told them I would go, they just had to wait, but I was labeled as a failure.
My parents did not graduate from high school, so when I graduated from MacArthur High School they were extremely proud. Now the next step would be college, so I entered college to study Computer Engineering. Many people don’t really know what Computer Engineering is and I can understand that.  I literally searched in Google “careers that deal with computers” and computer engineering sounded interesting to be part of building computers and evolving them making them better and smarter.
Throughout my life, I’ve been messing with computers, and I’ve broken many by trying to open them up and “fix” them. Each time I would open one and see the many components of a computer I would be intrigued and every piece of equipment in there has a purpose; I want to know what each thing does and its correspondence to making the computer function. I will do my best in school to make my parents proud, to have a career in my life, to have a job that can support my family that I will have in the future, and to give them the best life I can provide.
For most of my life I’ve been lost.  I was never sure of what things I wanted to accomplish and many people in my life would ask me, “que quieres hacer en tu vida?” The answer would always be "I’m not sure about that at this moment," and I would get lectured on thinking about it seriously. I didn’t listen because I imagined that I would stumble across something interesting; I kind of did, by messing with computers I realized I was genuinely curious.
My folks don’t know what Computer Engineering is but even when I explain they ask, “is there even jobs for that?” Since they are from Mexico, their perspective is quite different than that of someone’s who lives here, so I do my best to let them know that I will be successful by working towards this career. There are many bumps in the road of becoming a computer engineer but I will get through it all no matter what.

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Manuel is a current student in Professor Bruce Martin's writing course.