Serendipity | Irma L. Olguin Jr. | Bitwise Industries

PROJECT NOTES:

This video was created in-house for Bitwise Industries. I adapted a speech by Irma Olguin Jr. to establish script highlights. Then, I developed questions for Irma to add detail and context for the storyline. I worked alongside a media production team to help match visuals to the script.

🎥 Watch the full video here 🎥

SCRIPT

I come from a rural town that's fueled by agriculture. The town is made up of two different groups -- a group that owns the farms and a group that works on the farms.

My family, in particular, is definitely in the latter category. From grandparents to grandchildren spending quite a lot of time in the fields. 

When you grow up in a place like that you have a very specific vision for your life and that vision doesn't include college. So, I remember really specifically a day when I was 15 years old and I heard over the PA speaker at school, if you want to go take the PSAT go to the cafeteria now. But, my 15-year-old brain heard, if you want to get out of class for half a day to go to the cafeteria now. I did and that would turn out to be the single most important test I'd ever take in my whole life. 

After the test I started receiving mail from colleges, things like brochures and catalogs and ended up with a full-ride scholarship offered to a college in the Midwest.

So, I take this news to my parents who are really supportive, who I have never known not to work at least two jobs at a time and we all kind of realize, at the same time, that in order to accept the scholarship we're gonna have to find a way to get from here to there.

That means that it won't be the tuition that keeps me from going to college. It's the bus ticket. So, to overcome this new hurdle my family banded together and hopped back on the tailgate of a pickup truck and we spent all summer recycling cans and bottles until we had enough for a bus ticket.  Which really illustrates that in the scheme of things, it's almost never the obvious things that stop you from doing what you want to do. It's almost always these miniature things that you don't know how to navigate. 

After college I ended up moving back to Fresno and by then had collected a number of years of experience working for a large number of companies. But it wasn't until I started working inside of an incubator and I was freelancing for nearly every company inside of it, when I kind of realized that the things that they were missing, trying to make their dreams come true, was really similar to the bus ticket that I was missing trying to make my dreams come true. 

That was the moment when I thought to myself this is how I have to spend my time. I'm gonna use all of these years of collected technology experience and I'm gonna help these people move their dreams forward. 

Looking back over these decades of life, you recognize these singular moments of serendipity and you realize that it doesn't have to be serendipity, but that we can be a lot more deliberate about the people that we’re reaching and about the way that we get young people to envision their own lives. 

We get to ask ourselves the questions like what happens when you take the son or daughter of a migrant farm worker and you unleash her potential in the city center? Does she create 10,000 jobs?

And, if that's the case, shouldn't we be spending all of our time reaching out to these people? To everyone who's been told they were an underdog? To the people who are traditionally left out of the most exciting parts of our economy? 

Shouldn't we be spending all of our time lifting them up?