Beatrice Arreola
Wilmington, DE
It was the summer of the end of my sophomore year in college, when I got an internship in an engineering firm. It was my second engineering internship and I was excited that I was working in my field of study. I was part of the small structural section in the company which caused me not to be slightly isolated from the rest of the company. One day I had to go to ask a section leader of another group in the building a question about a project I was working on and after discussing it he asked me if I knew the landscapers that did the company’s lawn. I didn’t and he continued to ask if I was sure because he saw in the newspaper an ad for a landscaping company that had my last name on it. He asked me if I had anyone in my family that worked in landscaping. I thought about it and replied that no one in my family ever worked in landscaping to my knowledge, my father was a trucker and my uncles were either that or farmhands. Finally he said he thought that my dad was one of the landscapers and that he had talked to the president of the firm and that’s how I got a job offer. I told him that I met the company contact at a job fair on campus, was called in for an interview, and then was hired that way. Being a naive college girl it didn’t bother me at the moment but it wasn’t until the end of the week that I came back to think of that conversation that it really began to bother me. To this day I wonder if he thought that because I am of Mexican decent that the only way I could get an opportunity to work there would be if I knew a landscaper? I wonder if he even believed that I was an engineering student.
