Janice Rojas

I attribute my success to my positivity and just keeping going. I think that sometimes we are very hard on ourselves, and we doubt ourselves because we've knocked on one door, and the door doesn't get opened. And sometimes you just have to remind yourself you have to knock on 1,000 or maybe 10,000 doors just to get one. Everything isn't going to come to you easily, so you just have to keep trying. I think it's a mixture of my happiness, to always want to do better, and my relentlessness to just keep trying.

The best career advice I've ever received is to do something you like, don't follow the money. Because money doesn't necessarily generate happiness. It can and it can't.

I would give you a quote that one of my professors gave me many, many, many years ago, and it was essentially that there's two things in life that you don't get back. It's your time, and it is your words. And that being said, you just always have to think, triple check what you say before you say it out loud, because you can never take it back, and that can either do you very well, or it can make a new road for you. That's my advice to the future generations.

The biggest opportunity right now is anyone that is willing to learn or wanting to learn how to work with these new AI agents. My current favorite one is Claude. I would say that that is the biggest opportunity right now, because I look at AI specifically as an enhancement, but not a physical enhancement, more like a mental capability enhancement. If you could think of maybe someone that's having writer's block, you never have writer's block, and you're able to have what is the next topic at hand. With Claude, you can have an idea, you can have all of the information, and just go from there. Of course, you need to know where the limits are, because AI sometimes fills its own answers through the cracks if you're not very careful. So I think that's the biggest opportunity, and that's not just for my field, but really anyone that's looking to grow within the professional side. I think AI is a double-edged sword. If not properly used, it can give you misinformation and make you look very bad in front of others if you have a presentation and you haven't double-checked the work that it has provided to you. On the other hand, I think that if used correctly with the proper prompting, with knowing what you're doing, and you really have to understand the subject that you're working with with AI, you can really enhance your current capabilities. With using AI, if used properly, you can make the proper modifications and make a hamburger a Shake Shack burger.

The values most important to me are telling the truth, ethics overall, and transparency. I think that transparency and honesty and ethics are synonyms to each other, but they're not really all the same thing, so it's a mixture of all of them that has really shaped my success and my career. Never allow someone else's rules to dictate yours. You always want to follow your own rules, and kind of just think to yourself, okay, would my parents or would someone that I look up to be okay with me doing this? That really has shaped a lot of things that I have done going forward. And if the answer is yes, I think they'll be proud of it, or they'll be happy with what I'm doing, then it's a no-brainer, just going forward.