‘Roadtrip Nation: All Paths Arizona’ helps students find their way

“Roadtrip Nation” is a PBS series that follows three college students as they travel the country, interviewing different leaders and exploring career options and talking about how their educations helped open doors for them. For most recent season, titled “All Paths Arizona,” the show partnered with Helios, a program to help students understand how important secondary education is.

We spoke with Paul Luna, President and CEO of Helios, and Ezequias Fuentes, one of the students about the program, which airs on Arizona PBS on April 11.

Luna says that “Roadtrip Nation” specializes in telling stories about students and how education can improve.

“Roadtrip Nation” takes students around the state to see where they want to go to school, but also interact with community leaders so they can see how their education affected them personally.

Fuentes is one of the three students involved in the documentary. He got involved through one of the programs in his school, and he was excited to see the different leaders involved.

“One of the things I learned that was the most inspiring was their passion and emphasizing that where they are was because they did not let nobody or anything tell them where to go. They took advantage, they took advice, but at the end of the day they continued to walk their path,” Fuentes said. He said it changed his expectations, and liked hearing their stories about how they switched up their life later on.

“What we find and what we see, and I really encourage the audience, find the special, find ‘Roadtrip Nation’ and watch it… what you will find is that in these students stories and what they heard from the leaders they got exposed to is everyone can find a little bit of themselves in the story… I think that sharing and understanding will help lift all of us,” Luna said.