My biggest takeaways from this interview are what she said about college. It really helped me feel less anxious about deciding on college and stressing out about where I want to go. Like what she said when we asked her, “What advice do you have for a prospective Harvard applicant?” She told us “To make sure that it's a right fit, being the brand itself, because whether it's Harvard or anywhere else what feels like the dream, like in my journey with my undergrad, I thought that that was going to be the right fit. And I get there and I'm like this is not what I want to do everyday.” So she had to completely rethink her plan and look at other options. She also ended up taking 2 gap years because she knew she wasn’t ready to go to college just yet. I really admire her advice about how only you know when your time is right. She took the 2 years off to work, she didn’t even take her SATs or any tests when she was in high school because she just knew that the time wasn’t right for her. Francine actually became Ms. Philippines during her second gap year. So she didn’t just take 2 years off to do nothing. She got herself sorted out, thought a lot about what she wanted to do and then when she went to UCLA after those years she said it never crossed her mind that she would be older than everyone else or anything, she just knew that now she was ready to go and so she went. Some other advice she had for her teenage self was to always leave a place better than you found it, whether that be through cleaning up or leaving a positive impact on the people you’ve interacted with. Her advice about choosing a career is “I think if you pursue something that where there is no place to really grow in it, it's going to get real boring really fast. So even if it's not the exact role or even direction that you thought you might take, or even if it's at a different time than you thought that's okay that's totally okay. Both career-wise and education-wise I've had a lot of twists and turns, but in the best way.” If you know that you’re a goal driven person make sure that in your career there are opportunities for you to set goals for yourself and achieve those goals. A few reasons she chose this career as District Office Director is because she liked that she didn’t set out to pursue it, it spoke to all of the different things she’s passionate about and her skill set. My takeaway from this is that you don’t really have to find one job or topic or major that you want to focus on for the rest of your life, you can try to find a mix of all the different things you’re interested in. So for me in trying to figure my life out and choose a major I don’t need to find something where I’m like: Okay I feel comfortable enough putting myself in this one box for the rest of my whole entire life. Because that’s just insane, there’s no way I can figure that out. I need to shift my mindset to looking at the different skills or subtopics that I can learn about within a certain major. Because then I have multiple options within that major. I know that when I graduate I don’t just have to work as a scientist or a writer, but I’ll also have a background in marketing and sales or media. So even though I may not know what I want to do as a specific job I can set myself up for success by taking a page from Francine’s book. Becoming well versed in multiple topics and then finding a job where I use multiple skills that I enjoy.