Julisa Salas ’10 meticulously planned and achieved her way from Washington Heights to Middlebury, Harvard Business School, and a picture-perfect marriage. Then, a major life change taught her about accepting the unplanned.

Salas shared her story in April 2024 as part of the “Purpose and Place: Voices of Middlebury” event during the NYC launch of For Every Future: The Campaign for Middlebury.

Listen to Salas’ talk above or read the transcript below.

Transcript

I was born in Washington Heights.

The Heights: it’s a place of dreamers, bodega owners, construction workers, nannies, all working 24/7 around the clock in order to be able to provide for themselves, send money back home, and be able to set their kids up for the best possible chance to make it.

I remember taking the subway down to places like the Upper West Side, and I realized these neighborhoods were not like my neighborhood. There were beautiful parks, no trash on the floor, no music blaring from the cars.

Things started to click for me. 

I was poor.

And now I realized why everyone’s dream was for their kid to make it out of the Heights. Study hard, study hard, and maybe, one day you’ll be able to make it out.

Look at Judy. She did it. She made it out. Be like Judy.

And so I did. I got a Posse scholarship, went to Middlebury on a full ride, got a coveted job at a bank, went to Harvard Business School, and later joined a startup that I led over the span of six years.

And I did this by always having a plan.

See, when you come from the Heights, there is no room for error.

By 2022, I had made it. I’m married to a fellow Harvard Business School grad. We’re living in a nice luxury apartment, and I find out that I am pregnant. I take this upon myself, as I’ve done everything else in my life, and I’m really making a plan.

I get things for the nursery months ahead of time, check. I’m on the daycare waiting list a year and a half ahead of time. Check, check, check, check.

But there’s one thing that’s not going according to plan, and that’s my marriage.

We’re from different cultures. We’re from different continents. We have different hopes, different dreams, different communication styles.

No one had given me the framework for how to make a marriage successful. Where was the class for this? Where was the Judy for this problem?

I couldn’t even let anybody in, because my life, from the outside, seemed so perfect that it would’ve been too much to let anybody know what was going on.

So I thought, what if this was a Harvard Business School case?

I took out an Excel spreadsheet and made a list of all of our issues, prioritized. I made a list of KPIs and what we were going to make progress against. I put a deadline on the calendar because obviously we were going to solve it by that point in time.

We love offsites. We love to travel, so I put a quarterly offsite on the calendar. I figured this would be a great way for us to get away and measure progress against our goals.

Unfortunately, that did not go as planned. My husband was not having as much fun with these offsites as I was. It started to feel like I was spending a lot of time working on something that wasn’t really going anywhere.

So at nine months pregnant, I finally let somebody in, and I’ll never forget what they said: “Julisa, for once in your life, you have to drop the ball.”

So I called my mom. “Mom, I’m coming back home.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“I’m coming back to the Heights.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

So, I’ve been back in the Heights for about a year now, and last fall we did a fall family photo shoot. I went back and forth on this because—do a mother and daughter really count as a family? Do we get to have a fall family photo shoot?

Yes. Yes, we did, I decided. And I did this the way I do everything else. I booked a photographer a month in advance. I looked at the fall color palettes and settled on white and beige outfits. I had this image in my mind that I would send out our holiday newsletter and it would say something like, “Yes, I got divorced. Yes, I’m back in the Heights, but we are doing just fine.”

Then I get to the park for the photo shoot and it starts to rain. My curly hair starts to frizz. I let Luna’s hand go for a second, and she starts to splash in all of the puddles. Her white and beige outfit is now brown.

I get this feeling again. I spent so much time planning this, and this is not going according to plan.

And then I look at Luna for a second. She is having a blast in all of the puddles. The photographer is chasing after her in her now-brown outfit, and I take a moment to take it all in.

The Heights may have been a place I’ve been trying to leave my entire life, but today it is my home.

I look at Luna again and realize she’s learning about the world through me. I could choose to be upset about my ruined photographs, or I could not be.

So I join her in the puddles. We splash, we dance, and we sing.

Thank you.