Excerpt from personal essay

Despite my best efforts to conceal my humble beginnings, I was unable to fool anyone in the early years in New York. At my first internship in the city, I was sat next to the boss’s son and I was desperate to earn his favor but we were different. He had attended a montessori school in Manhattan where he was primed to fulfill his destiny of becoming a liberal arts prince whereas I went to a school in rural Ohio where our math teacher was just a lady living in town who was ‘good with numbers’. I realized he had me figured out within the first couple of weeks when he told me we were ordering burritos for lunch from a restaurant called oaxaca and when he told me to look up the menu online he said “that’s spelled O-A-X-A-C-A”. You couldn’t imagine the depths of my despair. Knowing what I know now, he saw me for who I was the moment I walked through the door with an at-home bleach job wearing a suit from Burlington Coat Factory.