National borders can feel incredibly consequential, but many of the challenges that affect our lives, like economic opportunity, infrastructure, and pollution, don’t stop at them. I grew up between San Diego and Tijuana, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as a regular part of life. Growing up on both sides of the border, and later becoming a first-generation college student, shaped how I think about communities, opportunity, and the public challenges that connect them.
Along the San Diego coast as a lifeguard, I saw Imperial Beach and Coronado repeatedly affected by pollution flowing through the Tijuana River watershed–a decades-long problem that has worsened to the point that Imperial Beach has been closed to water contact for more than 90% of the days since 2023. It continues to be an environmental issue, but also an infrastructure, governance and cross-border coordination problem. The fact that such a visible problem could persist for decades made me interested in what stands between recognizing a public challenge and actually solving it.
I came to Watson because I wanted to understand how policymakers evaluate competing solutions, how evidence should inform policy, and what it actually takes to implement an idea successfully.
Watson taught me to ask more precise questions. What are the incentives and tradeoffs? Who has the authority and capacity to act? How would we measure and know whether an intervention worked? Who benefits and who is left out? Through economics, statistics and applied policy analysis, I learned how to both recognize a problem and develop a recommendation that is analytically sound, realistic to implement and easy for diverse audiences to understand.
Those lessons have carried into my work across government and consulting, from federal environmental policy enforcement to supporting major energy and utility transformations. As I begin my career in management consulting, I hope to build a career focused on solving difficult problems, bringing people with different perspectives together, and turning good ideas into outcomes that meaningfully improve people’s lives.
My advice to current and future Watson students would be to use the program as a laboratory. Explore issues outside your comfort zone and test your assumptions. Some of the most valuable lessons I took from Watson, specifically the Policy in Action Project, came not from finding a simple answer, but from learning how to ask a better question.