Sebastian Gutierrez was getting ready for the opportunity of a lifetime.
He was in a tiny shoebox of an apartment in New York City. He spread his arms and stood in the center; he could nearly touch each wall, but his only qualification was a “place to sleep close to the office,” so it fit the bill.
He slicked his hair back, since his curls don’t always cooperate, and put on a navy suit and his biggest coat against the East Coast January temperatures. He carried a briefcase his mother had given him, because in the New York she had seen, everyone carried one. On his feet were python boots his father had brought him from his hometown in Mexico.
“They’re my prized dress shoes, because I get asked a lot of questions about them,” he said. “It’s the best representation of where I am from, so it’s like I keep a little piece of me and home wherever I am.”
Sebastian made his way outside and began the 20-minute walk to the first day of his 10-week internship in the Financial Markets and Real Estate (FMRE) group at PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), one of the Big Four accounting and auditing firms worldwide.
It was almost an out-of-body experience for the Amarillo native and Texas Tech University student as he traversed the packed city streets with people hustling to work instead of driving through the open West Texas landscape.
“I was extremely nervous on my first day,” he said with a chuckle. “I just started walking, looking around at the huge buildings. I was thinking it was a fever dream because what are the odds of the kid of an immigrant working (at PwC)?”
While Sebastian may have been in a new environment, this was not his first experience in the real estate world. In fact, he grew up working on the construction side.