When I was growing up I was always told that I could be whatever I wanted to be. When you're three or four or five you don't think that there are any exceptions to that kind of idea. I didn't know that my being a girl, or my being Latina, would hold any weight on my ability to be whatever I wanted to be. As I got older, it was easy to tell myself that the world was becoming more progressive with each passing year. I grew up in a diverse town, went to schools that had predominantly African American or Latin demographics. I went to an all girls high school, where we were taught to empower and exhibit leadership. We heard whispers of the difficulty women faced in the working world, but we told ourselves that things were getting better. Once I got to college it didn't take long for me to realize that my ethnicity and my gender weighed heavily on how I was perceived by the world, and how I was going to be treated. I worked hard in college, building my resume while still taking on leadership roles on campus and maintaining a social life. Watching Hillary Clinton, a candidate I'd so passionately supported throughout the 2016 Election, lose, crushed all of the hopes I had that a woman like me really could be whatever they wanted to be. If a qualified woman could lose an election to a severely under qualified man, what was stopping the world from preventing me, a Latina woman, from taking on the roles I deserved. This period of my life has taught me that I can work as hard as I can, but it'll only be through a change in the attitude's of others, and the perception of women and minorities in this country, that women like me can have the world open up for them. I have faith that one day it'll happen, and I'd be honored to say I was one of the millions of women that marched, spoke out, and stood up for their rights and made their voices heard. I hope that one day, Hillary Clinton's words will echo true: "To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want-even president."
~Anonymous