I am a professional counselor with a combined 10 years of experience in educational counseling, psychotherapy, severe mental illness and psychiatric evaluations. Overall, I am a counselor, but as a person, my life experiences are what have influenced the different areas of counseling that I am involved in. I immigrated to this country at a young age and the experiences that I had as a student led me down the path of school counseling. I wanted children who were bilingual to have a positive experience in which they didn’t feel that their language barrier was equated to their general educational abilities. I grew up in an area that was plagued with poverty, drugs, homelessness. Where high school dropout rates, teenage pregnancy and early death due to gangs were amongst some of the many challenges that were faced daily. I became intrigued by the power of the mind and the resiliency that we as humans have. Wanting to understand people's behavior led me to study psychology and work in severe mental health. I had a desire not only to help, but to understand how we can be affected by our environment and overcome it, to know where our human resilience came from.