“There are people who are smarter than me, harder working than me, more driven, more brilliant. That’s not to say that I’m not any of those things, but there’s this cult of exceptionalism. I don’t buy into it, and I think they’ve let some of us in to kind of keep the system the way it is.”

Yscaira Jimenez was on a path to success. She graduated from Columbia and landed a competitive private tutoring job with great pay. As a daughter of immigrants and an immigrant herself, she was living the dream and making her family proud. But when she reflected on how she got to where she was from the access and opportunities she secured, she decided to go down a different path. Tune in to hear how Yscaira leveraged her privilege to shatter systems and build new ones, identified hiring culture and the education-to-workforce pipeline as systems to change for the better, why we must change the entrepreneurship and startup narrative, and what it means to take responsibility to serve your community and the world at large.

For more episodes of On Course: The Podcast from Echoing Green, visit anchor.fm/echoinggreen.