Driving Music

Once upon a time it was my plan to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company. I may not have known the first thing about being a CEO or what a Fortune 500 Company actually was, but that was my goal. It may or may not have had anything to do with stilletos and cute business suits. Regardless, I went off to my first year of school as a business major and signed up for accounting and marketing in my first semester. Reality hit me somewhere between the long columns of accounts receivable and payable after hours of staring at meaningless numbers, erased multiple times to be shuffled to yet another column that made even less sense to my tired brain. I wasn't cut out for this.

I was currently a double major, and my other field of interest was psychology. I knew I wouldn't make it through 8 more years of school to be able to actually use psychology, so I was at a bit of a loss. Then my Grandma came to visit me in Iowa. My grandma is a social worker at Maryville Academy near Chicago. My Grandma and I are a lot alike, and she gets me. We had a couple talks over tiramisu that weekend and I decided social work sounded more like me. I took a bunch of gen eds (that didn't transfer) to finish out the year and then wound up in Winona as a social work major with fuzzy ideas about what social workers actually did.

Turns out we do some of everything, at half the cost.

And we're very liberal.

This all brings us up to Fall 2009, where I'm seven months away from holding a diploma and joining the real world. You may remember my quarter-life crisis a few weeks ago when I had no idea what next semester held. I knew I needed an (almost) fulltime practicum and it needed to off this list of a hundred approved agencies in a 150 mile radius of Winona. You may also remember I had "no clue" what I wanted to do. I'm interested in mental health, and homeless people. I'm also interested in nutrition, counseling, immigration, and human trafficking. And I feel strongly about women's issues. You pick one.

So I visited half a dozen agencies off the list. And I really really liked one. Two, actually. But one was working with immigrants and refugees in Rochester. The Intercultural Mutual Assistance Association builds bridges between cultures and provides services and resources to immigrants in the community. They connect people with translators and offer job training and life skill classes, and they connect people in the community to other services they need.

Last week I went to interview. I was told there was competition, but I had the placement as soon as I walked in. I'm going to be a minority there, which I think is sweet because I love learning about other cultures. I'm told the staff likes to cook together over lunch break and I'm pretty excited. I will be working with the program manager, learning how to work in a cultural social agency at the macro level. I'll be teaching job training classes, going to international fairs and workshops, representing IMAA in the community, and planning fundraisers and events. I won't have my own caseload since I don't speak another language, but will instead be learning how to manage all the programs. Which kind of sounds like exactly what I wanted to do before I could put it into words.
Did I mention it's in a business office, so stilletos are still applicable?

I'll be driving 110 miles to Rochester and back four days a week, so I'm on the hunt for good driving music. But I'm suddenly really looking forward to the rest of this year.