Resilience & Discipline

Ramiro Campos is Haile-Manas Academy’s Dean of College and Career Counseling.

From my first interactions with HMA students, I was able to see myself in them. HMA is an incredible opportunity to pursue education in a very different type of institution than is found elsewhere in Ethiopia. Our students take advantage of that opportunity by working hard, always thinking of their families and communities. They ask themselves, “How can I do my best here so I can go back and give back and help others the way I was helped?” With that pressure and drive comes resilience.

Like HMA students, what got me through the trials and tribulations of my academic pursuits was an unwavering commitment to myself and my family. My parents brought our family to the U.S. to ensure that my siblings and I had the opportunity to get an education and to better ourselves. I am the second youngest of eight children, the first to go to college and the only one to earn a four-year degree and pursue a graduate degree. 

I grew up in South Los Angeles and attended an underfunded inner-city public school where many students are unable to advance to high school, let alone graduate high school and attend college. After 9th grade, I decided that I wanted a better quality education and convinced my parents to enroll me at a high school over an hour away by public transportation. Around that time I heard a quote by Martin Luther King Jr. that has since served as my life motto: "If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” So for three years, I woke up every morning at 5am to make the long trek to school. I remember falling asleep in the bus and sometimes even missing my stop because I was exhausted, but I knew it was necessary, and am proud of the resilience and discipline that I displayed at such a young age. 

That experience helped me learn how to adapt, to stay on task, to ignore disruption and get work done, skills that helped me navigate what was often a chaotic educational experience. Once I was in college and then graduate school, I did not want to push ahead to only better myself for me, I wanted to do it for others as well. That is how I found myself as a college counselor, wanting to guide other hard-working, motivated students to pursue their future regardless of their circumstances.

At HMA, our students are high achievers, many of whom also come from less than ideal learning environments. But when I interact with them, they do not complain, they are not talking about all the obstacles and challenges they face both inside and outside our campus  walls—they get up and push forward. Their unusually positive approach to challenges has truly impacted the work that I do with them and reminds me of my own lessons of adaptation.

I remember when I first got to HMA’s campus I would get frustrated about electricity outages and limited wifi. I was not frustrated because of my own loss—I was frustrated because I felt the students were denied the best experience possible. The students, by contrast, rarely stayed in a place of frustration. Rather, they immediately moved to look for a way to work around the problem and finish whatever they were doing.   

An example of this I will never forget is our first SAT prep virtual session last year, with our then 11th graders. About a third of the students could not connect to wifi and as I was then new to campus, this caught me by surprise. One student, Yeabsira D., noticed that I had panicked a bit and approached me with a solution. She suggested that everyone who could not connect on their own devices gather in my office and tune into the session as a group. And it worked!  In quickly moving to creative problem solving, Yeabsira displayed resilience that went above herself, as she made sure that her peers also benefited.

I am a firm believer that you can be the smartest person in the room but if you do not have resilience, you will not get as far as a determined and committed hard worker. I see resilience in HMA students, and I know that with those skills, they are going to thrive in their lives, and that is a beautiful thing.