Jade Karina Ruiz

I think coming from a single mother, seeing how hard she worked and never accepting help from anybody else, and just handling it on her own has made me an overachiever. I'm so hard on myself, making sure I had a job straight out after college. I was working throughout college for all four years as a server, I worked at school, I worked an internship, and I went to school full-time just to be able to support myself, because I didn't want to put that burden on my single mom. I paid my own tuition, and that just fueled me to be hungry and want to grow, want to be successful because of the single mom that I saw raise me on her own and give me the world while taking care of me.

Just to always be confident in myself, and that's just something that I always keep hearing from my managers, my VPs. Never second-guess yourself, never second-guess the work that you're doing. Even if you might not have the answer, still be confident enough. You can always go back and be like, hey, actually, you know, and with confidence, tell them this is actually the right answer. But having that confidence in yourself overall, the way that you carry yourself, the way that you present yourself, if you're confident in yourself, that will just speak volumes into rooms and to people that it'll leave an impression on them.

I would say never second guess your worth in the workplace as a woman. I work on a team that is completely female, and I think that is just amazing. My head of HR is a woman, our payroll manager is a woman, the senior managers, our recuiter, so it's just amazing that you see all these different wonderful women from different backgrounds coming together to work. I think that's why I get that wonderful support, being a woman of color myself, that I have all these different women from different backgrounds who are understanding and being supportive, because at the end of the day, I feel like we can all see a little bit of ourselves in each other. At one point, they were at my point in life, you know?

Just the fact that because we are a smaller team, my managers and my VP of HR have been more willing to let me in on certain things. Being bilingual really helps a lot with the employees, so when they're doing ER investigations, I'm able to sit in and translate for them, and get to see that aspect of things, and being exposed to things very immediately, so I can be a sponge and be able to absorb a lot of stuff. I'm constantly in the rooms having conversations with them about certain things, seeing their way of thinking of how they go about coming to a decision about something. They have been very open in my learning process, and I have my one-on-ones every other week with my manager, and I'm able to freely speak to her and tell her what my goals are, how I want to grow in the next couple of months for that next position, and they have been just so supportive about stuff like that. Having the supportive team that I have here has been just wonderful for me to be able to grow, learn, be able to make mistakes and relearn from them.

I like to attend a lot of networking events and I volunteer a lot at my church on the side, working with this lady who has her own nonprofit and helping her volunteer and facilitate events for the community or being invited back to my high school now as a profssional to speak on Career Day. I volunteer for a nonprofit called Girls on Campus, and I'm involved in different girl-affiliated things where it's about woman empowerment. Spending time with my family and with my dog, I have a pug named Bailey. I think it's so important that there are support systems where there are women who are willing to give you advice, and there are people for you to connect with. The work that organizations like this are doing is so important to make others feel empowered and build confidence.