Sarah Espinoza-Leon

What is your favorite word?

Discipline.

How do you define it?

Discipline is following a plan or personal track regardless of motivation or other feelings. It means staying up late studying, learning time management skills, taking accountability for mistakes and failures, and learning from them to be better.

How has this word influenced or inspired your career?

I want to stay disciplined in my academic path. Discipline has greatly helped me maintain a balance between my academic and social life while having a full-time job and a work-study position in my school’s Study Abroad office.

What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned?

I’ve learned that people will rely on me regardless of how prepared I feel I am, especially in the hospitality industry. My management team has often relied on me to ensure service and customer satisfaction, as I’ve learned to approach problems uniquely, tailored to the position I’m fulfilling at that moment.

What do you consider to be your most important career achievement or milestone?

Joining a laboratory as a research assistant in the Department of Chemistry, where I work with novel technologies to characterize epidermal cells. This was a milestone in my career as I learned about the work and maintenance done in a laboratory, and the label-free technology of QCM-D.

What do you aspire to accomplish in your career and why? What obstacles will you overcome?

My goal in medical chemistry research is to develop medicine and treatments that are economically and physically accessible to people, always staying true to my life mission of helping people with every resource available to me.

Describe an amazing opportunity in your STEM career.

Working and helping people is one of the best opportunities that I’ve had while advancing my career. As an aspiring sophomore, I am gaining the knowledge and resources necessary to contribute more to the community.

How was AWIS helped you professionally and/or personally?

AWIS has helped me find a supportive community composed of women in the field of science. Knowing that such community exists gives me confidence that I can achieve the career I desire.

How does AWIS impact your career journey?

As a First-Generation College Student Scholarship recipient, AWIS represents growth, it represents support, and a path to stay in science. It’s built my confidence by showing me a strong, diverse community of successful women in their careers who inspire me to achieve my goals and become  one of them.

What are you currently reading or listening to?

I am re-reading a book called I Am a Cat written by Natsume Soseki, where we read the book from the perspective of a rescued cat that lives with its owner, who is a teacher. The story is situated in 1900s Japan and works as a comedic analysis of society.

What do you consider the best professional or personal advice you’ve ever received?

“All the knowledge that you have will always stay with you, whether you are alone on an island or in a prison. No one can ever take it away from you.” A co-worker said this to me when I was seventeen years old, after I said that I’ll never  ind a better job because I won’t be able to learn English.

Sarah Espinoza-Leon was raised in Ecuador and moved to the United States in 2021. She came to the US on her own and has been growing and learning from the hospitality industry for the past four years. After those gap years, she decided to pursue a goal of higher education in Chemistry. She plans to use all resources, current and future ones, to help the people who need it, contributing to the community that has been so understanding to her.