I would consider my young professional life to begin once I started working in New Work as a Product Owner. It was the first time that work was a higher priority than my studies. However, the first time I earned a buck was long before. My family from my mother’s side comes from a very small rural town in Hidalgo, Mexico. Even now there is 3G in some areas, and at that time there would only be reception for 2 TV channels. I would go over the summer usually for a month to help my uncle with his farm. I was 5 years old when I started this tradition. He had pigs, sheep, cows, donkeys, chicken, dogs, cats and his passion, horses. A typical day would start at 4:30am to milk the cows, go around town to sell the fresh product, come back and before breakfast, feed the all the animals in the farm. The animals would always eat first. No exception. Then it was time to get prepared to feed the animals for lunch, so we would go about 5 to 10km into the valley to the crops my uncle owned to harvest them by hand, pack them on the donkey, head home, feed the animals and the eat ourselves. By the time we were done for the day I would be around 6pm, time enough before bed to play domino and enjoy the sundown before starting all over again. This was one of the most fulfilling jobs I ever did in my life. There is something about a hard day’s work that makes me look forward to life and the next challenge. Although I would have helped my uncle for free, my parents would give me $100 pesos per day which is about 5€ now. After each summer I would have more than enough to buy my favourite toys, but I very rarely would. I preferred saving it.

The first time I got paid due to my wits was during the first summer I was travelling alone. I was 12 years old and more than 9,000 km away in Oxford learn English in boarding school. The university would have children between 8 and 15 over the summer to stay in the campus. We were divided in 2 groups by age. The cut for the little children was 13 and the staff would differentiate us by green bands that would be given to the younger children. My group had most of the advantages inside the campus. We could choose our activities first and most importantly, eat first. This was extremely important as the food in the campus was dead awful, but there was usually one dish that was bearable, which, of course, would run out sometimes even before the older group would have a chance to eat. But the older group had the right to go out of the campus on weekends, which meant that they could buy food and stack up on candy for the week. I saw 2 opportunities. I had a friend that would buy Big Mac for me, which I would later sell for a higher price. And I would constantly lose my green band, get a new one and sell it to the older kids so they could join us in the early eating shift. At the end I made enough money during the summer to buy my first iPod, a big chunky thing with 100g of storage. 

My next gig was during high school. After around 10 years of sweat, blood and tears (No hyperbole on any of those) I was a half decent rider and was winning some regional tournaments. An investor approached my trainer and me and proposed a cooperation. He would buy the horses, my trainer and I would train them and I would compete them. If any of the horses would be sold at the tournaments where I showcased the horses I would get a 5% cut. Besides the financial incentive this cooperation was amazing for me as now I would have the opportunity to train and compete more that 10 different horses, with new ones coming in. I loved that time as I would train for a couple of hours during the week and 4-5 hours on weekends plus all the tournaments. This cemented this hobby as an undying passion in my life. 

University in Germany was much more demanding than what I had expected, but once I adapted to the workload I was ready to increase the challenge and I started looking for side jobs. At the time, as any young, ambitious 20 yo., I was very into entrepreneurship and would attend those conferences religiously. There I met 2 brothers with a Biomimetics startup, who held a presentation on bio-inspired underwater robots. They were impressed about how much I knew about it, but being an engineering student and having spent hundreds of ours underwater during my dives gave me a clear advantage. I asked them if I could to an internship in their company and they agreed. My project was to create a recommendation for one of their soon-to-be partners. I had 6 months to prepare a presentation on what types of artificial intelligence algorithms and data science method would best suit their applications. The client was an stablished oil training company that wanted to increase their competitive edge by implementing artificial intelligence into their trading. The challenge was not only develop the recommendation but also understand it so deeply that I could explain it to a group of executives and traders confidently, in German. I was nervous but the presentations and workshops went well enough that they decided to hire me as a working student on a project basis to develop, implement and test my recommendations further. This was a super exiting time as I was learning something new every single day, testing it our and trying something new the next. Sadly, the strategic visions of the board did not align and the young company was dissolved. 

My focus now was on finishing my studies as soon as possible and getting a full-time job thereafter. I wrote my Bachelor’s thesis and then planned to finish my 2 year engineering Master’s degree in 3 semesters. However, I realised that only focusing in my studies was not motivating me at all, so I decided to look for a working student job without changing my timeline. Here is where I stumbled into business intelligence. While hanging out with a friend of mine, he casually mentioned that he needed to hire a working student (BI Product Owner in New Work SE). I didn’t even know what my friend did for a living, we were good buddies but we never talked work. After he explained what he did and the position was about, I immediately told him: “Hire me, I can do that!”. He was sceptical and it took some convincing but at the end he recommended me for the position. I was very lucky that he always pushed me into taking product owner responsibilities and reporting design work instead of the more mundane work is commonly delegated to students. 

After some months I started asking for more responsibilities and tasks which the team, after noticing my work, was happy to provide, I began managing projects of my own. At first it was difficult as my stakeholders were not used to student managing projects and I felt the scepticism, but in due time I earned their respect as well and things only got smoother. In order to finish my studies early, I had planned to write my Master thesis with a collaboration between the university and New Work SE, but my team lead and director proposed a different approach. I would work full-time and do my master thesis on the side. On first sight, this seemed to be too much to deliver as both are considered full-time endeavours, however I decided to go for it. It was a challenge and completely worth it. I enjoyed working with the business intelligence team and I felt at home in the company. There was always something to learn and improve while being in an encouraging, open and friendly environment.