Alumni Spotlight: Jessica, Cohort 25, Is Racing Towards Her Future

Jessica has always had the race in her. Her love for motorsports engineering and car racing has taken her from High Jump to Oxford Brookes University, from building a buggy in her high school automotive class to McLaren Racing and Extreme E, and from Chicago to the deserts of Saudi Arabia. But even before she discovered her love for motorsports, she’s had a race in her that drives her to follow her passions wherever they take her and to build communities of learning and support along the way. 

When Jessica started middle school in a gifted program, she was a lifelong math whiz, but her educational journey had never encouraged her to explore much beyond her comfort zone. But from the start, her participation in High Jump helped her reframe challenges not as barriers, but as opportunities to learn and grow:

“High Jump gave me a safe space to fail. Or like, the ability to learn something new, and then not like, have any repercussions. Our teachers were like, some of you guys have probably never seen this before. And it’s okay that you haven’t seen something like this before because we don’t expect you as a human being to ever know everything. So it’s okay. Take your time, really take in this information, and if you still don’t understand something like ask a question.”

In the safe space of High Jump that encourages exploration without repercussion, Jessica found like-minded peers who were “nerds like me who were awkwardly good at one subject or awkwardly good at everything and could geek out together.” After being with the same group of students for most of her life, High Jump opened up a world of new people from different backgrounds with whom she could forge bonds of friendship and shared learning.

“Math was our last session of the day, but, instead of going home, we would definitely all linger afterwards and be like, all right, guys, let’s, let’s get down and dirty. Let’s do an extra problem from the advanced book. We were trying to be real mathematicians. We thought we were going to solve one of the unsolvable formulas right then and there, like, big news alert, seventh graders are able to solve this previously unsolvable formula.” 

While Jessica had a lifelong love of engineering, she didn’t know where that love would take her in the future. Undaunted by any obstacles that could stand in her way and without fearing failure, Jessica voraciously explored potential futures in architecture, chemical engineering, and aerospace engineering, with none of them feeling exactly right. “I learned patience through this process because of High Jump, because they were like telling me in, throughout my years, like, you know you might not even know during your first year of college what’s right for you. It’s okay to make changes and it’s okay to explore.”

Growing up, Jessica had always tagged along when her mother had to take their white Honda four door to the mechanic. She watched as her mother, an Ecuadorian immigrant, struggled speaking with mechanics who didn’t speak Spanish and who overcharged for services. In her senior year of high school, Jessica signed up for an automotive fundamentals class because she wanted to know the ins and outs of a car, learn how to do an oil change herself, and help her mother ensure she wasn’t taken advantage of anymore. Her practical desire for knowledge quickly transformed into a fiery passion. Her math brain was spinning. Her love of engineering was soaring. And her love for group learning and a collaborative working environment that she found at High Jump, she found once again in motorsports engineering.

Jessica is like a moth to a flame when it comes to pursuing opportunities in her life. Soon after she felt that passion spring forth, she quickly immersed herself in researching the world of motorsports, looking for a foot in the door of a world that was deeply foreign to her. “I researched a lot and looked at where everybody from Formula One, IndyCar, and NASCAR went to university, and found out a lot of them went to Oxford Brookes University. So I made the grand decision to apply.” 

Since getting accepted into Oxford Brookes’ motorsports engineering program two years ago, Jessica has worked hard to line up opportunity after opportunity to establish herself in an industry which, despite gains, remains very insular and very male-dominated:

“I recognize that I’m a first gen Latina woman. There are not a lot of us in the motorsport industry! My first year in England was the hardest because not only was I experiencing a cultural difference, but I couldn’t navigate people’s response to me being in these types of programs, in these types of spaces, and trying to make me feel like “oh, you’re here just because you’re a girl.” I pushed myself and pushed through it and just felt that internal confidence of knowing that there are people who learn about cars at four, and, tough luck for them, here’s a girl who at 19 learned about cars and oil changes for the first time and she’s at the same university, in the same classes, with the same professors. Once I got my foot in the door, I wanted to rip that door wide open.”

Despite having “never seen a classic car before,” Jessica became a junior race engineer with the Oxford Universities Motorsport Foundation, a student-run organization that builds cars to participate in races at such classic tracks as the Goodwood and Silverstone Circuits. While working on these cars, Jessica began developing “a foundation to learn the smallest things, the terminology, the differences in how different people might like their car setup.” 

Now, Jessica is doing everything that she can – from opportunities at school, to working the merch tent at the Chicago NASCAR race, to prestigious industry programs – to immerse herself in the world of cars and learn from the people who have already established themselves in the industry. Jessica was chosen to be a part of the prestigious McLaren 60 Scholars, a program to encourage and support the next generation of female leaders in STEM. In the program she got to visit the McLaren’s Woking, England Headquarters and got incredible access to McLaren engineers, pit stop crews, and leadership including McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown, gaining an in depth understanding not just of the inner workings of one of the largest motor racing teams in the world, but also a realization with echoes back to her time in High Jump: 

“When working with the pit stop engineers, I had to understand how is a person able to take in all of this massive amounts of information and not crumble. They gave me the incredible insight that, you just have to remember you’re just a person amidst this all. Just like in High Jump, they made me feel like I don’t have to know everything right from the start. There’s no secret formula. I can really dive in, digest, do my best, and grow in my own way.”

Through McLaren 60, Jessica applied and was chosen as one of only two students to serve as a STEM Ambassador for the Extreme E racing series. Early this year, she was whisked away to the deserts around Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where, among many other responsibilities, she led VIP tours for guests and sponsors around the paddock, answering their questions about the engineering behind the off-road electric cars and the series’ future transition to hydrogen-powered racing. Along the way, she got to chat with three-time W Series Champion and current Indy NXT racing driver Jamie Chadwick, rally driver and Extreme E team owner Carlos Sainz Sr., and one of the people managing the Extreme E race in Phoenix later this year, and she didn’t let that opportunity go to waste: “We were just bouncing ideas off each other about what we could do similar and different to Jedah when we go to Phoenix, and I’m like, wow, I just spoke to the person organizing this massive event and he was listening to me and my ideas that were coming to my mind at a thousand miles per hour!”

As she looks to her future starting with an internship in GM’s motorsports NASCAR division this summer, Jessica is continuing to put all of the growth from her time in High Jump to work, bring her zest for passionately pursuing opportunities and her openness and ease to navigate any space and speak to anyone in any room (or racetrack) no matter how famous or powerful they may be.

“I think before High Jump, I was very much just a numbers girl back in the day. I was so analytical when it came to speaking to people and felt very robotic in analyzing who is in the room, how do I need to conform to what they’re like. But now, I feel I can speak to anybody about anything regardless of power dynamics, age difference, or anything. And that continues to open doors for me.”

In just the three short years since racing across the pond to pursue her dreams of motorsports engineering, Jessica has blazed through all barriers that stood in her way, and has not just gained a foothold, but has put herself squarely in the driver’s seat on track to an incredible career, racing to the top of the motorsports world.

Hear What Supporting High Jump Means to Jessica