Three times, Arelise Vasquez has seen Osceola County Commissioner Brandon Arrington at public events. All three times, she made a point of introducing herself and letting him know she was taking full advantage of the opportunity for a tuition-free college education that he helped bring about.
Vasquez, 22, has already earned an associate’s degree at Valencia College under the Osceola Prosper program and is working toward her bachelor’s in applied science and organizational leadership with a concentration on management. And she’s already exercising her entrepreneurial muscles, incorporating a startup called Feminine Torque last spring. It’s a car-sharing service for a 2014 Porsche Cayman S with premium wheels to match its gray paint.
The rentals are more than covering her loan on the car and she’s gaining experience with finance and marketing — she designed her own logo and promotes the business on social media. “It’s been, I like to say, bumping. Business is kind of booming for my first time,” she says.
Vasquez has long had a passion for cars and says the rental business is a steppingstone, not the dream. In high school, one of her uncles let her do small jobs at his Speed Auto Repair, a one-bay shop in Kissimmee. She loved getting her hands dirty and the feeling of taking things apart, fixing them and putting them back together.
“I want to run something like this one day, but my way,” she thought. “I want it to look a certain way.” She’s already got a shop blueprint.
Her uncle urged her to go to school first. That didn’t seem likely when she started her senior year at Poinciana High School. Two of her close friends died in a car accident, traumatizing her, and she was rejected by the universities she applied to.
Then came an assembly and the unveiling of Osceola Prosper.
“I had no plan, really, and I had no money for that next plan until Prosper,” Vasquez says. It wasn’t easy. Once on campus “everything seemed foreign to me. I didn’t understand majors. I didn’t understand minors. I didn’t understand how do I even obtain a major? How do I figure this out?”
Valencia staffers helped her find her way. She was elected to the student government in her first semester and found herself its president later that term. In her second year, she worked in the provost’s office as an administrative assistant where she made presentations to the college’s leadership team.
The experience exposed her to an aspect of higher education she hadn’t considered. “College is not just studying and tests,” Vasquez says, “but meeting new people, networking. I never understood the significance of networking until I got here.”