Her Story
About Angelina
I founded my organization, Golden Student Bears, and have been working in organizing for 3 years since 2024. My daily work involves sending positive affirmations and task assignments to my volunteer interns each morning, collaborating with my co-founder on future projects and reviewing applications in the afternoon, and scheduling the next day's work in the evening by creating Google Sheets and Canva documents. One of my most notable achievements so far was speaking at the first-ever Mental Health Youth Summit in Seattle, Washington, which was led by teams in Washington state and powered by Nexus for Schools and Google. I'm currently a high school senior about to attend college, and I'm a first-generation low-income student. I've had to transfer schools multiple times due to a lack of educational opportunity and safety, and I rarely had opportunities to pursue advanced placement courses. To overcome this, I started taking community college courses during my freshman year of high school and have earned almost 60 credits by now. My educational journey has been rocky with some hiccups along the way, but I'm proud that I took the initiative to pursue educational opportunities on my own, and I believe that resilience and self-initiative are what I've learned through this whole journey of navigating education.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Angelina
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think it's all of the horrible experiences I had throughout high school, because I was really motivated to create my organization, Golden Student Bears, because of every bad experience I faced. I feel like resilience is really important, but if you can do something with everything you went through and all the bad things, good things, all the things that inspired you, and just make something of it, I attributed it to every single bad, good event that has came across in my life. I know that sounds broad, really broad, but it's true.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Follow your passion, because if you always follow your passion, you'll always find your way. I got that piece of advice from my elected teacher in high school, and I believe that was really good advice.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say that there will be a lot of people who would doubt you. Initially, I would receive a lot of advice from mansplainers that would tell me, like, oh, you didn't do this right or do that right, and it would usually be people who don't even have experience in the first place in that field, but they would always feel like they have superior knowledge just because they're of a certain gender, even though that shouldn't be the case. I feel like, as women, it's really hard in any industry, especially in leadership, to navigate it without someone always doubting you. So I would say, like, just ignore all the haters, like, only listen to people who are dedicated to empower you. Empowerment doesn't mean super harsh critiques. Empowerment means finding a way to communicate, finding a way to work with you and empower you without hurting your feelings or destroying you. Because empowerment feels empowering, not like you're being degraded or belittled.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I would have to say dedication, because if you're really dedicated to your work and really passionate about it, you can go really far. If you're dedicated, you're always gonna follow up with communication, follow up with your own tasks and stuff, but if you have no dedication whatsoever, then you're not motivated to work. And I think that goes into my personal life with relationships, and also my own hobbies.
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