For the first semester, I lived in the international dorm. I was lucky enough to have a room all to myself, a small luxury that meant more to me than anyone knew. The students were warm, friendly, and from all corners of the world. I didn’t feel like a stranger. I felt like I belonged. I quickly made friends. Florian, the German student who had picked me up from the airport during my first visit, was there once again to welcome me back. I later learned that this was a tradition organized by Butler’s International Office: international students take care of each other. It touched me more than I can express; in a moment of uncertainty and new beginnings, I wasn’t alone. That very same day, almost without thinking, my feet carried me back to the music department. I picked up my guitar and practiced like someone who had been starving for years and had finally found food. Eight hours passed in a heartbeat. When I walked out of the building at 10 p.m., exhausted and overflowing with joy, I felt reborn. It was as if I had stepped into the life I had dreamed of since I was a child and it was finally real. But the real challenge was still ahead. On the first day of class, I met my mentor, Professor Felice. He went over the courses I needed to take for my first semester, around 14 units, plus choir. But as soon as I heard the number, something inside me spoke clearly: it wasn’t enough. I had waited too long, fought too hard. I wanted to move forward as fast as possible. So I signed up for 20 units. Professor Felice raised his eyebrows. He told me he’d need to ask the Dean of the Music Department for approval. It was more than unusual, it was borderline crazy. But the Dean said yes. And just like that, my life was set: mornings filled with lectures, afternoons buried in study, and nights spent practicing my guitar until my fingers ached. There was no time for parties, no college nightlife, no distractions. I studied like survival depended on it, because in many ways, it did. This was my second chance at life, and I wasn’t going to waste a single minute. The music department supported me more than I ever expected. First-semester music theory was normally MT101, but they created a special introductory class for me: MT100. To my surprise, the professor was the percussion teacher who had been at my audition, Professor Crabiel. Young, enthusiastic, and always in a good mood, he made learning enjoyable. And for the first time in my life, I was truly learning the language of music; music theory, notation, everything I had been missing for years. I wasn’t just becoming a university student, I was becoming the musician I had always dreamed of being. ​My guitar professor, Brett Terrell, was one of the kindest souls I had ever encountered. From the first moment, he treated me not just as a student, but as someone worth guiding, patiently, gently, with a quiet confidence that I could become so much more than I was. Together, we began to rebuild the foundations of my playing: my technique, my sound, my musical expression. He saw everything, the good, the bad, the raw potential and he helped me reshape it. But the greatest gift he ever gave me was something far more profound: he taught me how to sight-read. We started with the simplest pieces, tiny studies that any beginner could read. But for me, each one felt like a mountain. His rule was always the same: look at the music, breathe, and play, right away. No rewinding. No guessing. No relying on memory. Exactly the thing I had failed to do in every audition… and yet, somehow, the same weakness that had brought me to Butler with a scholarship. Life has strange ways of opening doors. Learning to sight-read also meant letting go of something that had been with me since childhood: my grandfather’s old tape recorder. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can see it clearly, its faded buttons, the soft mechanical click as I rewound the tape, trying again and again to catch every tiny detail. Those hours felt endless, but they shaped me. That crude method became my secret weapon. Eventually, I could hear the difference between an open string and a stopped note. I could pick out all the voices inside a chord. I could sense how a musical phrase wanted to breathe, to swell, to fall. My ears were my first teachers; intuition was my guide. But at the university, a new world opened before me, a world where sound had structure, where emotion had logic, where every note had meaning. Music wasn’t just something I felt anymore; it became something I could understand. And in that moment, sitting there with my guitar in my hands, I realized something extraordinary: everything I had ever done, the tapes, the rewinding, the sleepless nights, had prepared me for this new chapter. My past and my future finally met in the same room. But the one thing that still strikes me when I think back, was the determination I had, the focus live I was going through shaped me. In the years I studied in Munich/Germany I also developed a passion for dancing. The one activity that made me relax from my studies and my practice was Salsa dancing. And it was also an intensive time, learning a high level of salsa dancing, sharing and social dancing in different Salsa parties that were usually organized by different dance schools; it became also a passion. I discovered that feeling music and expressing.