Mariana Atencio: What Makes You Special? at TEDxUniversityofNevada (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript and summary of NBC News journalist Mariana Atencio’s TEDx Talk presentation: What Makes You Special? at TEDxUniversityofNevada conference. This event occurred on January 21, 2017.

Listen to the MP3 Audio:

TRANSCRIPT:

Thank you so much.

I am a journalist. My job is to talk to people from all walks of life, all over the world. Today I want to tell you why I decided to do this with my life and what I’ve learned.

My story begins in Caracas, Venezuela in South America where I grew up, a place that to me was and always will be filled with magic and wonder. From a very young age, my parents wanted me to have a wider view of the world.

I remember one time when I was around seven years old, my dad came up to me and said: “Mariana, I’m going to send you and your little sister, who was six at the time, to a place where nobody speaks Spanish. I want you to experience different cultures.”

He went on and on about the benefits of spending an entire summer in ‘this summer camp’ in the United States. Stressing a little phrase that I didn’t pay too much attention to at the time, ‘you never know what the future holds’.

Meanwhile in my seven-year-old mind, I was thinking we were going to get to summer camp in Miami. Maybe it was going to be even better and we were going to go a little further north to Orlando where Mickey Mouse lived. I got really excited.