They say when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But for Karla Gonzales, she didn’t have a lot of lemons to begin with, and didn’t exactly have the smoothest ride to get where she is right now. Despite the odds, this hardworking lady surpassed the difficulties with flying ‘maroon’ colors.
Karla juggled being an operations executive in a call center and studying (and finishing!) civil engineering in University of the Philippines Diliman. It wasn’t really the most ideal position to be in for a 22-year-old, but she made it work, drawing strength from her values and support system around her.
Karla was raised by her single mother and grandparents in Parañaque, and their primary source of income was a small stall in the local market. That was where her love for mathematics began.
It was going well for them for the most part until supermarkets started rising near the market, and the their business started declining. The situation started getting more challenging when got to high school because aside from the steady decline of the family business, her mother got pregnant with her sister, and her grandmother got diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer which eventually took her life 5 months later.
Despite the struggles, she was lucky enough to finish high school on time because of her full scholarship. Fast forward to college, it was another set of challenges she had to face.
Drastic changes started happening in her life during her third year in college: she was living away from her family so she could be closer to school, and her mother’s small business had to close down again. Because of this, they were again left with the prospect of being separated and solely supported by her aunts.
Later, a great opportunity presented itself to her.
“I heard from a friend that Teleperformance Ayala had an account that caters to students working part time. This was when UP adjusted the academic calendar from June to August,” says Karla. “Needless to say, it was physically and mentally draining. I barely got to see my family since I had to sleep all day.”
It wasn’t easy juggling work and school, according to Karla, especially with the Manila commute. She lived in Las Pinas, worked in Makati, and studied in Quezon City. The commute was unbearable and the expenses were difficult to handle. It got even harder when she entered the last two years of her course because it was purely civil engineering major subjects they had to take.
“It was hard to adjust since my schedule wasn’t fixed. Sometimes I worked in the morning and attended class in the afternoon, and sometimes I had class in the morning and worked in the afternoon until evening,” she says.
But despite having to balance submitting projects, problem sets, and sit down for exams while maintaining good performance at work balancing her AHT (average handling time), sales conversion, schedule adherence, and call quality to qualify for the monthly performance incentives, she never thought of calling it quits even though she was having a hard time.
There were times when Karla would envy her friends who only needed to worry about school, while she had to think about budgeting paychecks and making reports. But every time this happened, she thought of what her mother always told her: “She tells me that we can make it through one day at a time, and when we eventually make it to the end, the victory will be so much sweeter,” recalls Karla.
She has these wise words for undergrads going through some challenges in school and in life: “To all the undergraduates out there, especially those who have encountered failures, I would just like to say kudos to you. Through your failures, you’ll learn more than you can ever learn from your successes. Through your failures, you’ll discover the strength and resilience that you possess. Through your failures, you’ll stand up once again and finish what you’ve started and in the end, the victory will be so much sweeter.”
Source: Kalibrr.
