Cohort Stories: Meet Guillermo
vol. 5, no. 43 — guest post by Guillermo Gutierrez
My background is that of a first generation Brazilian immigrant that came to the United States a couple of decades ago. My mother had a dream of going to the United States ever since she was young and watching Elvis Presley, Rin Tin Tin, and movies about Daniel Boone. They were considered middle class in Brazil, but immigrating here, she had decided to start completely over. Over the years I saw our family grind to make it through everyday, but my mother tried her best to hide the fact we were scraping by. She had done a tremendous job of that. Looking back all I could remember was my mother coming home from her house cleaning business (most days) smiling and ready to spend time with us.
Working hard and instilling that industrious spirit into her sons just so they have a chance to go to an American university is what I am proud of. It’s pride in my family rejecting comfort and striving for something more.
My family decided to leave the relative comfort of home to pursue and achieve the American dream.
As a child, I remember a curiosity I had in a textbook. At the time, I only knew that the book was about a language called C++ and I thought that was a strange name for such a thing. Opening the book, I was introduced to basic exercises for a coding bootcamp. Needless to say, I couldn’t make sense of anything as I stared at the code. Have you ever looked at a foreign language and everything looks like gibberish with english words here and there? After 20 minutes of staring I put the book away. That book still sits in my family’s collection. Going forward 10 years, I had another spell of curiosity. Convincing my then partner to allow me to purchase a subscription to learn a language called Liberty Basic, I started to learn very basic things in programming eventually making a simple Hi-Lo program. After experiencing how involved a simple program could be, I immediately started to think about how I had to work so hard for a program that was console-based and here I am looking at CGI in a movie or video game. It was very humbling. Four years later I enrolled in community college as a CS major.
In only a couple words, my family motivates me. My mother and her wife support me and my endeavors, but my three daughters are what started my journey that now leads me to this Hack.Diversity opportunity. I have a dream that I can someday tuck them into bed before it is too late with food in their bellies in a home in a safe neighborhood. As cliche as it is for someone to say that their children are their reason for everything they do, if it were not the case I would be a very different person. No goals, no drive to study; the only thing I would bother to do would go to work and come home and repeat. Needless to say, they opened my eyes and metaphorically woke me up to “go get it”. I am willing to make it so that they have as many opportunities as I had, hopefully more. Anytime that fatigue or boredom begins to rear its ugly head when I am working on a project, my daughters give me that push to do extra before turning in for the night.
