Jóvenes Adelante’s New Class 2023: Meet Rigo

By Don Krim

His name is Rigo.

“In this world we are born to live, and we live to…. Well, each person has a continuation for that phrase, I live to learn more about the world.”

Baby-faced, affable, innocent, a renaissance man of only 18, his thirst for learning so intense as to jump off pages of his application. I have translated his words from Spanish.

“My biggest dream is to be able to study the careers I like so that with that knowledge I can make a better world.”

Notice the operative word: not career, but careers! His application to Jóvenes Adelante posed three seemingly disparate paths. Ten minutes interviewing clarified all: the first path, organizational psychology, was less desirable because it led primarily to employment in big business; the second, renewable energies, carried technical fascination and social consciousness but was attractive mostly because it was an immediately affordable 2-year degree; the last, general psychology, is his true passion. When asked, Rigo states confidently that if he could only afford to study renewable energy tech at this moment, he would want to follow it up later with another degree in general psychology.  He truly wants to know “what makes people tick.”

A curious mind can be a lonely place growing up in a working class, historically important but small provincial city like Dolores Hidalgo. His father died when he was young; his mother working in a pharmacy is his strength and inspiration.

“I am not a fan of living with groups of people, because I feel suffocated. My personal habits are reading and studying topics of interest to me on my own. This has helped me to be more prepared.”

Rigo’s mind became evident early:

“When I was a child my mother and I bet a thousand pesos as to which plant was growing in a pot; she said ‘mango’ and I ‘avocado.’ When we transplanted the plant, we saw the avocado bone, and I earned a thousand pesos and good memories.  I consider myself a reasonable, organized and understanding person; I usually look for a logical and well-argued answer to any question or situation; I like organized things, it makes me feel comfortable; before saying or judging people I usually think about the reason for their actions.”

Reflecting on school, Rigo shows an unusual love of learning for his age, an intrinsic motivation to know.

“…All subjects seem equally complex to me, but it is only about getting used to it. I have not had irrelevant school experiences, as I study until I am satisfied with my knowledge…. My strength is to learn easily, a weakness could be my excessive daydreaming.”

“I have always seemed different from other people, because I tend to do the opposite of what is expected of me, but what makes me truly different is that I often have goals that many consider impossible, and although I don’t know for sure if I will succeed, at least I know that I will try…”

Flash forward a few weeks, and Rigo has become a new JA scholar. His mentor – yours truly by good chance – reports that our first meeting alone was filled with discussion ranging over his chosen field of psychology and some of its most famous names, its roots in Greek mythology and theatre, references he has only heard of but has not yet explored in meaning — “deus ex machina,”  to one of his favorite fictional film characters, Sherlock Holmes.

Two weeks later he contacted me to discuss an early school project – to select a topic for investigation of research methods in psychology. He bounces ideas off me, as the choice of topic is wide open and his mind ranges widely:

♦  “Rustic calculator (a wooden tablet used in mathematical studies) that prompted the development of the modern programming systems;

♦  Experiments with rats: resilience – hope and its relationship to life;

♦  Clinical vampirism and its distortion by history;

♦  Experiment on rats; utopia and decadence.”

“What do I think would be interesting?” Of course my response is to query him back as to his choices, and how much he has investigated existing literature on the topics. He replies that all would be interesting and important to his career goals, possibly with the exception of the first.

And so our new JA students make their way into the next stage. Those like Rigo, just graduated from high school usually have the harder transition. Rigo, so far, seems to be fitting in just fine.

Inside JA, this is always such a time of discovery, where we meet our young cohort for the first time, often with their families, and then start the engine and see where they go! Stay tuned as I bring you more profiles in the coming weeks!

Don Krim can be reached at donkrim@jovenesadelante.org and more information about how to be part of these students’ lives as a mentor, sponsor or EFL tutor is available at www.jovenesadelante.org.