Hi everybody! My name is Veronica Lucena. I’m from São Paulo, Brazil. I graduated from high school at Etec - Camargo Aranha, a school from which I believe I was one of their first students to go to study abroad for undergraduate studies, and even with a full ride. This fall, I will be stepping as a freshman into the Babson College campus as a member of the Class of 2030!
My college journey was far from easy, but that never stopped me from turning my goals into a solid reality. With just a step of faith and bravery, I turned what was my dream school into the place I’ll call home for the next four years and hopefully for the rest of my life. Stick around, since I wish my story gives you hope and resilience just like it does when I look back in time.
Why the U.S?
Choosing to study in the U.S was a choice based on fit. I grew up surrounded by American culture. I never thought about any other country, to be honest. I grew up watching Disney Channel, showcasing big universities like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, and then when you start to look up, you know how hard it is to get into those schools. But Disney Channel made it look like a dream that could scale over time. It sounds childish, but I think that's honestly why I chose to pursue my undergrad in the U.S. I kept that focus, but action and a path started to appear clearer when I spent a year abroad. I stayed in Washington, and then I realized it was possible to go to a college and live the college experience in the United States. So, I started to look also for other countries, but I didn't feel a match for how good the universities over there do in the mix with leaving your college experience and also learning.
I believe in Europe, you have to be really focused on all conventional learning and have really good teachers, but they lack the fun part as strongly as it is in the U.S. Another reason to study abroad, specifically in the U.S, is that I have my host family over there. I still talk with them, so I have a safety net for myself in the country.
The college admission process in Brazil is pretty competitive, and it's really mentally heavy; it's stressful. Not that the process to go to the United States is not, but in Brazil, it's so overwhelming. Many universities, especially high-tier public ones, in the country use a big test called ENEM (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio) that tests all you should have learned during your whole years in school. Everything from languages, social sciences, natural science, math, and even an essay! All this through 180 multiple-choice questions over two days. So you have to recall and sometimes re-learn all you reviewed during your school days, and do two days of testing with more than a hundred questions. If you get a good score, great-you’re going to college. If you don't, you simply don't go for that year. Students who don’t pass the ENEM either retake it or apply through other admission pathways.
So that was too overwhelming for me. Plus, the U.S college admissions seem more attractive to me, due to the fact that they evaluate the student beyond their grades, but also their character, personality, and interests outside the classroom. Finally, they give the chance to the student to ‘speak for themselves’ through their extracurricular activities and writing rather than just reducing them to a test score.
Why Babson?
I'm really looking forward to growing something that's mine, and during my whole life, I've been surrounded by this. Both my parents have their business, making them entrepreneurs! So everybody is trying to construct something that's their own, and I want to do this too. So I was really focusing on colleges that could give me this opportunity, and Babson is fully focused on hands-on learning in this field. So this was what got my eyes on the list, but I didn't even think I was going to get in. I applied literally just as ‘let's just do it and see if we can get into it.’ But my hopes were not getting into Babson. It was just there for a little straddle hole!
But what made me choose it, besides academics, was that I got a full scholarship that allowed me to pursue my education. It's a Brazilian scholarship I got through a Foundation, and it covers basically everything that my education asks for. I also chose Babson because of the multiple choices that I have within the school. The school focuses on what I want: they have all the support I need to start my business over there, so I have to have a lot of projects that help other students to construct what they want inside the school. Even if you don't have your own capital, they have projects for you to use as your capital, so this is also one of the reasons.
Entrepreneurship: A Choice of Generations
When you study business, there are always people who will think that it's your ‘undecided major’. For me, it's not that way. I've thought about doing a lot of other things before doing this, but I really want to be in a place where I can push other girls to pursue their dreams. And that was the main point of all of my aesthetics: talking about how I want to create one day in my life a space where I can push other women to pursue their dreams at higher levels, such as studying abroad. And it's not common here in Brazil to do this.
I believe that when you have a company or when you have a brand that always tries to connect with women, it is much more than starting a conversation with ‘Oh my, how pretty you are!’ or ‘Oh wow, you’re glow up is top!’ but pushing your smartness is what I want to do with business. I want to study the field to put my ideas into that perception and empower other women in the process.
I believe business is studying the whole tool, not necessarily what you're building. When you decide to major in business, you can do consulting, you can be a manager, you can be a CEO, you can be a lot of stuff by studying it, but when you focus on entrepreneurship,you understand how you're going to grow something, grow and create something that is truly yours. With your identity, with your ideas, with your motivations and beliefs that you want to bring to the world. Likewise, I want to pass all that the baggage that my family gave to me, since we are a family of long-standing entrepreneurs; even my grandparents opened restaurants, bars, and clothing stores, so everybody was always renewing what they are trying to do, and it is a really common thing to deal with as an entrepreneur.
Opening and Guiding Others to New Doors
Etec - Camargo Aranha is a good school. It is still one of the best schools in the city of São Paulo, but to be honest, it doesn't have any ways that can help other people to go abroad and have the feeling of wanting to get out of the country, do something different, get out of the state. I pursue this as my own. I did have help from some of the school office staff. I talked with them personally so they could help me, but it's not something that the school itself gave it to me right away.I had to ask for it; knock on their doors. And then they helped me with my letters, for example, or with the school information, but my school didn't have any projects for it. And that's why I also want to start something on my own with my personal Instagram.
Academically speaking, it was tough. My grades in high school were affected due to the year I spent abroad. It was a different scale, so it was hard to translate the American GPA to a Brazilian grading scale. But at the end, if we use the GPA 4.0 scale, I would have gotten a 3.7 GPA. My grades here in Brazil were regular. I'm not going to say I was a +A or an extra 10 student. In fact, I applied under test-optional policies.
Academics were absolutely not my strongest part of my application. I really focused on some other parts of myself because that's the point! Since this was not the strongest part I had, I had to focus on other things to make my application stronger. So what I did was focus on my overall narrative. So all the extracurricular and other parts, I connected everything to one history, in the persona I wanted the college to be. I know in the U.S they value this a lot, and it is something that they had ahead of all of us here in South America right now, and having a personal narrative is the way to break that matrix.
Teaching, Volleyball, and Donuts!
If I had to choose the extracurricular I’m most passionate about, it would be my time working as a teacher to kids. I taught classes to children twice or three times a month. I was part of a team, and there were other teachers, so we did rotations to prepare and impart biblical classes to children. We don't stop there; we do parties like children's days, chocolate parties, holiday parties, and in May, we commemorate Orange May, a movement dedicated to fighting abuse and sexual exploitation of children and teenagers_,_ by talking about sexual abuse with kids and protecting them. We give classes and instructions to them so that they can be protected, aware of who they should talk to when this is happening at home or at any place, to just take care of those kids and see them grow up. I’ve been their teacher since I was twelve, and now I'm nineteen!
As an aspiring entrepreneur, I had to start somewhere! I started some projects, such as a clothing store, selling candies, or donuts on the street. In São Paulo, it's really common to sell food on the streets! So I did this for a while, for like six or seven months. I produced donuts and sold them at affordable prices.
When I was in my year abroad, I placed third and sixth place on FBLA, Future Business Leaders of America, competition under the Social Media and Business category. In addition, I played volleyball, for which I got an honor for being a good teammate!
For the past few years, I have been pretty active with my church’s media team. Now, I serve them as the Vice Leader, and I help coordinate and train the team, which consists of five more people.
A More Girly Tomorrow
One of the trickiest parts of the college admissions game, almost anyone would agree, is that answering who you are in 650 words is pretty hard. I remember crying. I remember getting angry.
In the end, I wrote about the women in my family. I wrote about how their path should teach me and not block me through my life because that's something I believe a lot of us do. Instead of learning from the people who came before us, we get scared and try not to make any mistakes. And that was something that I was doing for most of my life. I was living scared of what could happen. I grew up in a place where I locked myself emotionally, and I didn't want to leave. Similar to a bubble.
In my personal statement, I expressed how much I wanted to be free, to live and feel and not be scared of it. I know some personal essays that were inspirational, but for me, it was just realizing that I needed to stop being scared; truly being what I had to live being, and inspired by the woman that came before me, because they suffered so much because of others. But they did not fill themselves with bad blood; instead, they were strong for me, so I didn't suffer like them.
As you could already tell, my personal statement was focused on the emotional journey, but the true, active growth was reflected through Babson’s specific prompt. There, I focused on the journey that I used and the inherited experience to build something of my own. Thus, this was the essay where I talked about the experiences women in my family had in business. I saw my mom try a handful of times to have her own business, but she doesn't have the knowledge.She didn't study for this, but I could see her desire.
I explored that desire doesn't move as many things as we would want it to. That we need to have the foundation of more than desire. We need to have the knowledge of what we want and how we want it to be built. That desire itself is good to start you moving, but what keeps you moving is your foundation and your knowledge. Then, I explain why Babson as a college would be the place where I could gain my knowledge. Finally, so I could make my dreams and the aspirations of the woman that came before me into a reality, and help the ones that would come after me.
After the Storm, is when the Flowers Bloom
I think what I would say is give your 100% self in the process, and trust whatever the outcome is, because you cannot control the results. We can control what you give in the process. So if you did everything you could in the process, the results are going to be what you needed. Because you cannot control anything else besides what you do. And controlling this, you're controlling everything you can. And trust the process. Trust God and trust yourself. Trust that you're capable. Trust time. Trust you. Trust God.
The first time I applied, I didn't trust myself at all. I was freaked out. crying almost every day, so I think that's something that I've heard in the past that gave me some peace. It may not work for me on my first attempt, but better things were waiting for me on the other side, on the other page of this chapter. Keep showing up. Keep pushing. And always keep learning and pursuing what you love.
