Meet Enrique: “My Future’s More Clear To Me Now.”

Enrique was scared of the question everyone kept asking him. An internship gave him a year to answer it - and a rail yard to answer it in.

Featuring Enrique

The fear came first, and Enrique names it without dressing it up.

"I didn't know what to do after high school and I got kind of scared, like, what am I going to do, how am I going to make money?"

He was a senior when a presentation came through in the first month of the year. The pitch was simple: finish high school, get a guaranteed internship, and the company you land at might turn it into a job - or at minimum, into experience you didn't have before.

"I thought, oh, that's really cool, because I didn't really have anything planned after high school."

The classroom side covered the fundamentals - practicing how to talk to an employer, how to write a resume. But the part students actually looked forward to was the field trips, where the class goes on site to the companies themselves.

His first one was a rail yard at SMART.

"We went to the trains and I was never inside of a train before, so it was really nice seeing that." They walked the class down into the pit and taught them how the equipment works - including the detail Enrique still repeats, that when there isn't enough friction on the rails, they sand them.

But the machinery wasn't the thing that landed. The people were.

"A lot of different personalities that you get to talk to, just interact with, and I'm like, whoa, this is an actual place with actual people that have actual goals and actual interests that I can talk to and work with."

The internship itself moved him around, and the range of it is striking for a first job out of high school. He worked as a laborer. He worked as a vehicle technician. He spent time in I.T. and time in engineering. Oil filters, cleaning, whatever the day required.

What he liked was how it felt at the end of a shift.

"Your hands are all covered in scratches and blisters sometimes, and they're dirty, and your suit's all dirty, and then it's really nice, because - oh, I actually went in and I did something. I made something of the day and I didn't just sit around."

His teacher had been having a harder conversation with him alongside all of this: what he wanted to do with his life, what he wanted for himself, what he wanted to do for others. At the time, those were nearly impossible questions.

They aren't anymore.

"Now I get to think about it more clearly," he says. "Where I want to go, who I want to be with, and what I want to do when I grow up."

He puts the whole thing in eight words: it changed the course of his life.

Watch Enrique’s journey below!