This document summarizes the experiences of two friends, Aleida and the author, as they struggled with deciding what to study and initially sought jobs and mentors to help guide them. They spent a month worrying and overthinking their futures before meeting with their philosophy teacher for two hours, which the author found insightful. They then decided to seek entry-level jobs for experience but faced rejection from most places they inquired. Ultimately, they realized through this process that their top responsibility is to focus on their education.

1. Javier Fernández Jiménez

2. • Have you ever had one of those friends who truly understand you and
with whom you have lots of fun while learning so much about life?
Aleida and I could consider ourselves as one of those. We have been
friends for years. We are quite similar and when we get together we
become one.

3. • It was such a strange period of our lives. We were kicking off the school
year and we found ourselves extremely confused by the circumstances.
Both of us would chat overnight about our future and our worries.
Everything revolved around this question: What should we study? We
wanted answers and we wanted them immediately. Medicine,
architecture, theater, business, etc. Nothing seemed to make sense. We
talked a lot about this to our school psychologist as well as watched
various famous talks on YouTube. I remember one of them was about how
important it was to have a mentor in our lives who we can learn from. So
the following day we tried to find some mentors and ended up in our
philosophy teacher’s office. We were there for approximately two hours
and I personally learned a lot about life from what he told us. We
definitely had a very tiresome month of overthinking.

4. • I do not remember the circumstance when we came up with the idea,
but we decided we should go out and try to find a job. We wanted
experience since that is the first thing people ask for when hiring
potential employees. We longed to feel productive and wanted other
responsibilities apart from studying. We also thought we would be ideal
for companies that are trying to reach the youngest people. You do not
want to have a publicist who is middle aged when you are selling
products to adolescences. All of those reasons made us lose every kind
of embarrassment we had left and turn our words into actions.

5. • We both took the same bus after school and walked around downtown.
We went to the auditorium, the city hall and various major stores. We
were looking for something related to the publicity of the store but we
were also interested in jobs such as a store clerk. “No, no, no” that is
what everything we heard that day truly meant. Only one of the people
we talked to seemed to understand us and only one of the stores we
went to gave us an application to fill in.

6. • When we came back home, we told our parents. They were definitely
not happy about the idea. However, after reflecting on the topic, we put
ourselves in their place and understood their point of view.

7. • We know it is good to be self-motivated and to have our own initiative. It
is a part of ourselves we are not going to change. After all, we both
learned that right now our responsibility in life is to study as hard as we
can. Once we went through this troubling time, we realized life is about
making choices and not everything comes easily.