The last time I found myself crying inside a bus in the line of work was on a rainy night in the summer of 2004, when I was working as an intern for Seventeen magazine. I wasn’t doing it for school (I just wanted work experience), but I was coming home late every night, and struggling to maintain an honors standing in school. That summer was also the time I learned how to commute on my own, and having been brought up in a private subdivision and driven to school every day, the experience proved to be a huge culture shock that overwhelmed me at times.

Looking back, those were some of the most character-building times of my life, and proved to be more useful for my career than my college degree in journalism probably did (don’t get me wrong; I learned a lot from school, but the years I spent as an informal intern did a lot more in introducing me to the industry). I pulled out clothes from stores and styled shoots, checked pages, went to events, met people, and most importantly, got articles published on a regular basis. I wrote my first magazine cover story that year. Sure, I wasn’t getting paid for most of my first year in the industry, but I skipped the entry-level positions when I graduated from school and worked for a magazine back home. I enjoyed it, but after a few years, restlessness and disillusionment with fashion magazines set in, and I hied off to grad school.

This was me at 19. I did a fashion ed for YStyle which featured me as a journalism student from UP, back in ye olden days when I thought I wanted to model. I feel old now.

Now, I’m 27 years old and not as energetic as I was when I started working at 19, but certainly in the same position as I was in on that rainy evening seven years ago. I had spent several hours running around in the Bronx, was late for a meeting, and frustrated by my inability to produce stories for my reporting and writing class for the J-School. Then I realized that I had missed my stop, and the express bus was coasting down a dark highway. So right there, in the middle of a bus bathed in fluorescent light, I burst into tears.

I was still puffy-eyed when I arrived at the meeting, but the attendees graciously ignored my “allergies” while I took notes. In the middle of the discussion, my reporting and writing class professor emailed me her midterm evaluation, which turned out to be a lot better than I hoped. She called me out on spending too much time on certain stories and getting discouraged when they didn’t pan out (guilty as charged), and that I needed to discipline myself in writing news stories, but tucked in between the stern lectures were glimmers of praise and hope. At the end of the 700-word evaluation, she said: “Bianca has all the raw talent, and the desire to do this well.”

At that point, my pretend allergies were at a fever pitch, and I batted my eyes repeatedly to prevent the tears from falling and embarrassing me further. Never mind that at 27, with a few years of editorial work under my belt, I’m still considered a “raw talent” in this part of the world. That professor’s assessment of my skills was honest, a little brutal, encouraging, and at the end of the day, hopeful. She was rooting for me, and I never needed someone to believe in me so badly.

Absorbed in my thoughts on the train ride back home, I initially didn’t pay attention to the subway musician strumming on a guitar and singing in Spanish. It took a minute or two for me to realize he was a possible source for a story I wanted to work on; had I seen him three hours earlier, while I was drowning in self-pity, I might not have noticed him at all. But bolstered by hope, I went up to him, smiled, and introduced myself as a journalist.