Several months ago, I received an invitation that immediately made me uncomfortable.
It was an invitation to speak at the Silicon Valley Robotics Fair, a gathering for both youth and adults, focused on robotics, artificial intelligence, and innovation.
My first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was confusion. Then disbelief.
Surely, they had the wrong person.
I don’t work in technology. I’m not an engineer. Other than playing with Legos as a kid, I’ve never built a robot. My career has been spent in schools. I’ve taught. I’ve created and led programs. I’ve worked with students, families, and communities. Today, I work for Horizons National, a nonprofit focused on expanding educational opportunities for under-resourced young people.
So why was I being invited to speak at a robotics conference?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my reaction wasn’t really about robotics.
It was about something deeper.
At first, I told myself the answer was obvious. I wasn’t qualified. There were undoubtedly people who knew more about the topics than I did. But the more I sat with my reaction, the more I realized that my discomfort wasn’t really about expertise.
It was about belonging.
Growing up in Glastonbury, Connecticut, I often felt very different.
My mother immigrated from the Philippines. My father came from Belgium. We looked different from many of the families around us. We ate different foods. Ours was not a story I saw reflected very often in the predominantly white, upper-middle-class New England town where I grew up.
My parents spoke with accents. They didn’t grow up skiing. We didn’t spend holidays surrounded by nearby relatives. And because my name wasn’t Chris, Kevin, Michael, or one of the names my teachers seemed able to pronounce effortlessly, the first day of school often came with a familiar yet uncomfortable knot in my stomach.
I don’t remember feeling unwelcome. But I do remember feeling different. Slightly out of step. Never entirely certain that I fit.
Looking back, I wonder if that was where some of those seeds of self-doubt were planted. Not dramatic self-doubt. Just that quiet voice that occasionally asks: Is this space really for you?
Over time and with the support and guidance of caring adults, I learned to navigate newness and uncertainty. I became a teacher, a school administrator, and eventually a nonprofit leader. I learned how to stand in front of rooms full of people and speak with confidence and conviction about things that matter to me.
But confidence has a funny way of coexisting with uncertainty. The invitation to the Robotics Fair awakened that old question once again: Do I belong here? And because I have spent much of my adult life encouraging young people to step into unfamiliar spaces, I felt compelled to say “yes.”
At Horizons, we often talk about growth happening beyond our comfort zones. Every summer, students walk onto new campuses, meet new people, try new activities, and take on challenges they have never encountered before. We encourage them to embrace uncertainty because we know that this is often a catalyst for learning and growth.
It seemed only fair that I take my own advice.
As the event approached, I felt a mix of excitement and anxiety. Not because of the subject matter, but because I was entering a world that wasn’t my own.
The familiar knot in my stomach was evidence that the discomfort was real.
And that is precisely what made the experience worth pursuing. Growth rarely happens when we stay inside the boundaries of what already feels familiar.
Ironically, one of the central ideas of my presentation was that learning cannot be outsourced. Research suggests that struggle, practice, mistakes, reflection, and adaptation are not inefficiencies to be eliminated. They are the very mechanisms through which learning occurs.
Standing in front of that audience, I realized I was living the message I had spent weeks preparing to deliver. I wasn’t building a robot. But I was experiencing many of the same things the students around me at the fair were experiencing.
Challenge. Uncertainty. Experimentation. Adaptation. Resilience.
In other words, I was learning.
And that may be what stayed with me most.
Not the technology. Not even the presentation itself. But the reminder that growth often begins with the willingness to try.
As I reflected on the experience afterward, I realized there was a deeper lesson hiding beneath the surface.
The invitation itself was an opportunity.
Not simply an opportunity to speak. An opportunity to see myself differently.
Someone else had seen a possibility that I didn’t yet see in myself. They opened a door. And by walking through it, I found a new understanding of what might be possible.
The experience reminded me that opportunity is powerful not simply because of what it allows us to do, but because of what it allows us to imagine.
Sometimes we do not know what is possible until someone invites us into a space that we never imagined occupying.
That insight brought me back to Horizons.
Since 1964, Horizons has been opening doors and helping young people discover what’s possible through relationships, opportunity, and joyful learning. At Horizons, we know talent, curiosity, creativity, and potential already exist in every community. What is not equally distributed is access to the experiences, relationships, and opportunities that help those strengths flourish. Talent is universal. Opportunity is not.
Many Horizons students face barriers that make those opportunities the exception rather than the norm.
Our work is about changing that. Not because we create talent. But because we believe every young person deserves the chance to discover what has been there all along, or what could be there given the opportunity.
My experience is far from the same as that of the students we serve. But it reminded me of something that grounds and guides our work:
When people are invited into new experiences and supported as they take on new challenges, their understanding of what is possible expands.
Sometimes what changes first is not what they can do. It is what they believe they can do.
And that shift can change everything. In every case, opportunity matters. Once someone’s understanding of what is possible begins to expand, it becomes difficult to see the world in quite the same way again.
Maybe for my next talk I’ll discuss the benefits of growing up on waffles and adobo. Stay tuned…
