A group of mentors encourages Monterey County students to dream big for their future.

Celia Jiménez here, thinking about the mentors who helped and encouraged me to keep going while in school. I probably wouldn’t be a journalist if it weren’t for them.

Having role models can be essential to achieving success, even beyond what you could ever imagine. That is something the Avanza Network, a national organization that empowers kids to pursue higher education, understands. 

The organization visits schools around the country and invites speakers to share their educational and professional journeys with young students. This week, it hosted its 10th annual conference on the Central Coast, speaking to hundreds of middle and high school students in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. 

Founders Rene Gonzalez and Frances Pinedo are Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates, and they said since having role models was a game-changing experience for them, they wanted to pay it forward. 

“There were like guardian angels along the way that told me about the different possibilities,” Pinedo says. 

Gonzalez says his math teacher regularly shared his college experience with his students. “He kind of made it seem more real and more attainable for many of us. So he changed the lives of a lot of people at school,” he says.

Gonzalez's brother, another MIT graduate, was his personal mentor—“He was a trailblazer in my family,” he says. “He was the first person to go to college.”

One reason the organization chose to visit the Salinas Valley was that many of its founding members, including Gonzalez and Pinedo, studied or worked in the area. 

Pinedo grew up in Soledad and was a migrant student. Her father was an irrigator who worked in the Salinas Valley. Every year, Pinedo and her family divided their time between Soledad and Jalisco, Mexico, navigating two cultures, school systems and languages. 

She is the CEO of Medavize Inc., a health-tech company she founded with Gonzalez (who is also her husband), that connects people to medical data. 

Pinedo attributes her current career path to professionals who returned to the area and spoke about their experiences when she was at Gonzales High School. She wants students to see a wider spectrum of what they can become.

Gonzalez says sometimes students aren’t aware of a career field or opportunities they can apply for to continue with their education.

“We want to make sure that they understand that it is definitely something that's attainable,” Gonzalez says. “Don't shy away from the cost, because many of these private universities give their tuition for free if the family is making less than $200,000 a year. Harvard and MIT are great examples.” 

Tomorrow, Feb. 21, Avanza is hosting a career fair and community open house at the National Steinbeck Center in downtown Salinas from 8:30am-1pm. 

As someone who grew up in a small agricultural town in Mexico, I know firsthand the range of possibilities for higher education was narrower than when I moved to a larger city. Learning about different pathways will help students make more informed decisions about what they want to pursue after high school.