Hardly anyone who knew Juan Puentes five years ago would have pegged him as Most Likely to Succeed. At the time, he seemed more likely to wind up in jail.
At 17, Puentes was a member of the Rolling 50s Bloods, a gang on the west side of St. Paul. He broke into cars and houses, stole bikes, graffitied buildings, took drugs, sold weed, carried knives — and "used them a few times."
To Puentes, that was just the norm.
"It's what my friends were doing, what I was doing," says Puentes, now an affable 22-year-old. "It seemed like everybody else was doing it, too."
But at least a couple of people thought Puentes could do better: his school counselor and his mother. Puentes got good grades, including in advanced-placement calculus, even though he skipped classes and racked up suspensions. He did well on tests.
His counselor told him about Genesys Works, then a brand new Twin Cities program. Open to students with challenged backgrounds but high potential, Genesys Works offered eight-week summer training sessions in information technology, followed by yearlong internships.
Get up early to study on nice summer days for eight weeks? Yeah, right. Puentes didn't even bother to read the brochure.
But his mother found it, read it, and urged her son to apply. To Puentes' surprise, he was accepted into the program.