Pieces of me : a real introduction

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have an amazingly supportive family who would probably jump through hoops of fire for each other. They are wonderful. Now, 3/5 of us live in Minnesota, 1/5 of us in India and myself, I live in West Virginia.

I attended undergraduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. For 4 ½ years, I studied to become a secondary social studies teacher. Midway through my last semester in pursuit of a teaching degree I decided the program was not for me; I felt it did not challenge me in the way I wanted to be challenged. I changed my major to History and added another, Women’s Studies.

After graduation, I moved to Boston; Brookline to be precise. And with that I started a 5 year adventure in New England. I decided midway through this journey that my liberal arts education needed some balance. I wanted to learn more about finance, management, economics, and business. I enrolled and later graduated with a Masters of Business Administration in 2011. I ended my studies with a practicum focused on the business of Farm to School: how farmers can increase their market diversity and demand by selling to nearby schools and the potential for sales growth for farmers in this area.

My next step was to practice management. During school, I worked at a high-volume yet local bakery and cafe and after graduation, I decided to interview for the Assistant Manager position. I was offered the position and gratefully accepted and thus began another year and yet another adventure.

This adventure was rudely interrupted in October 2011, when I was struck by the trailer of a semi in the middle of my bicycle ride home from work. Let me just say, I owe my life to a large team of trauma responders. Five surgeries later, I was well on my way to recovery and had learned quite a bit about myself, my family and friends, and that really, one of the most important things in life is how we respond to it.

After two months of intense recovery, I was itching to get back to work; I was slowly able to do this. For eight months, I practiced and learned a lot about what managing really feels like. And while my coworkers were amazing and I was working hard, I was unfulfilled. I wanted to use what I studied in pursuit of my MBA and figure out all the nitty-gritty details of Farm to school.

In mid-August 2012, a friend from my MBA sent me a call for Farm to School workers. The hitch was that the open positions were in West Virginia. There were seven open positions, each set to serve a single county.

I had been to West Virginia once and during that first visit, over the course of a few days, I fell in love.

So I applied, and Labor Day weekend I drove 12 hours south for two interviews in two very different counties. Both counties were interested; one county's supervisor extended me an official offer within 18 hours of my interview; just as I put my car into park in front of my apartment in Massachusetts, after driving through the night and morning; I had slept at a rest stop a few hours from Boston.

I accepted.

And with that call, I gave notice and began to gather up my things in Boston/Cambridge.

Eleven days later, after I finished packing my material possessions into a box and my car, I started driving toward Alderson, WV to stay with the same friend who had forwarded me the original job posting. I arrived twelve hours before my first day. Since then, it has been full speed ahead. I have been purchasing everything from seeds, dirt, and books, writing lesson plans and teaching them on a weekly basis, relearning Content Standards and Objectives and the bureaucracy of public education, all in the name of teaching children about food, nutrition, and what it is like to live well. 

So here I go, full speed ahead into the Wild and Wonderful, West Virginia.