We’re Armenian-American brothers who came to the U.S. as teenagers, full of hope and ready to work for a better future.
Like a lot of immigrants, we started from scratch—learning a new language, adapting to a new culture, and working construction jobs on the weekends just to get by.
We both went for engineering degrees—Vaz at Penn State in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Ashot at Drexel in Biomedical Engineering—thinking it would be our ticket to the so-called “American Dream.”
You know, go to school, get a degree, land a stable job, and work your way up the ladder. That’s what we were told would lead to success.