Mercedes Dávila, Ed.D

I attribute my success, first and foremost, to God, because I know He's been the one really helping me and making those waves for me. Beyond that, it comes down to having a strong work ethic and believing in yourself. There's no room for laziness or tardiness - you have to have that strong work ethic. People are going to believe in you, some people are going to try to push you, and some people are even going to try to talk you out of things that you want for yourself. But you have to believe in yourself - in your intelligence, in your mental strength, in all of those things. That belief in yourself, combined with faith in God and a strong work ethic, those are the things that have made the difference for me.

The best career advice I ever received came from my dissertation chair a few years back. I tended to always sort of underestimate myself, and she told me something that changed everything: just say yes. When you're asked to do a presentation, it's because people see something in you. You have information to give and to share, and you have knowledge. So don't underestimate yourself and just say yes. After hearing that advice, I stopped talking myself out of doing things. We tend to be our hardest critics, and we cut ourselves off - you could be so close to a breakthrough and not even know it, and you just have to keep going. You just have to say yes, and you just have to do it. It's about having that growth mindset. Even though we're not perfect in everything, we're still learning, and I may not know how to do that perfectly yet - the key word there is yet. I may not be where I think I should be yet, but I will get there, and I'm working towards it.

My first advice is always that you need to make sure you have your heart in this. This is hard work. We don't get paid a lot of money, we're not going to be rich women doing this type of work. This is hard work. So you have to have a heart for the students, you have to have a heart for teaching, and you have to have a heart for learning. After that, the biggest thing I can say is there are going to be hard days. There's going to be days that you mess up. But the next day is a new day, and you get your chance to do it all over again and get a little better at it. Every day, you have an opportunity to get better at those things, at anything really. That's the difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful one - one will say, okay, this wasn't very good, I didn't do such a great job at this, but I'm going to try again. That's what makes a successful person, and that's what separates those who make it from those who give up.

One of the biggest challenges is that I feel like educators don't really get the respect that they deserve. People are very quick to criticize schools and districts and students, saying they don't know how to read and the teachers must not be doing a good job. But every single educator that I have met just works so hard and is really trying to do the best that they can. It's just been such a systematic problem, and when it becomes so big, it's very hard to try to fix those systems. We spend more time with children during the day than their parents do - it's our job to teach them, but we're doing so much more than just teaching the basics like reading, writing, and arithmetic. We're teaching them how to be little humans. We're teaching them about empathy. We're teaching them how to take care of themselves and their bodies. We're teaching them how to be safe. We're keeping them safe on a daily basis. It's a lot. And people don't think of them as just students - every teacher I speak to always refers to them as my kids, those are my kids.

I value, above all, my faith. My faith in God is above all things, because I feel like He's the one that helps you do the things, right? And then just a strong work ethic. You have to have a strong work ethic. I think there's no room for laziness, there's no room for tardiness - there's no room for any of those things. A strong work ethic and my faith, those are the things that I value the most.