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Find out about  the College of St. Catherine's in St. Paul at its Web site.

Find out more about where Guzman attends school, Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, at its Web site. 

Finding empowerment in good examples

Listen to an audio version of this story.

Olga Guzman believes in the power of good role models.

Her mother, who works two jobs and has been working since she was a child, taught her about the value of hard work.

Her sister, Rosie, a graduate of the College of St. Catherine’s in St. Paul, taught her to chase her dreams.

Two good role models. Two dreams: To work hard and to do it in art journalism.

Guzman, 16, is a junior at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. This summer she is spending a week at a journalism seminar for high school students of color at University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.

Guzman is the sixth of eight children. Born in Garden City, Kansas, she moved with her family to Minneapolis when she was 2.

 Why does she want to be a journalist?

“To write what I want to write about; to write about things that interest me,” she said. “I want to do art journalism because I really enjoy art.”

But she also wants to be a good role model herself. In an interview on Monday at UW Eau Claire, she told of cousins who have and haven’t benefited from good advice.

“A lot of Hispanic girls in my community are intelligent but drop out of school and start working,” she said. “I think they’ve seen it in their parents.”

One cousin has benefitted from her advice about working hard in school. Another, however, had a baby at age 15, just as her mother did.

“You see the same repetitive pattern and you want to break it,” she said.

Guzman wants to avoid that pattern. Equally clear is that she wants to help others avoid it as well. “You really have to drill it into them early.”

She didn’t do well in her first year of high school, but her sister helped her with some guidance.

Her mother’s motto, she said, is “Life is about working and that’s all there is.”

Guzman buys the working part but not that last part about “all there is.”

“She’s been working since she was 8. I admire her … but I think I should do something I want to do and not get stuck in a janitor’s job,” Guzman said. Her mother, Santana, works as a packager and as a janitor.

In college, Guzman said she will pursue her two passions: journalism and art, majoring in the former and minoring in the latter.

“I hope to write but one of my biggest goals is to be a better artist,” she said.

There is a tradition of art in her family. Her brothers and sisters all draw, as does she. But her sister is the only one in the family to have graduated from college, with a degree in political science.

Guzman is insistent that her sister will not be the last.

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