Other than teaching what could have been an alternate career for you, and how did you come upon teaching?

From a young age I knew I wanted to become a teacher. My grandma taught kindergarten for over 25 years and I had fallen in love with going to her classrooms and watching her teach. Growing up I had always known that I wanted to teach elementary school and be as influential as she was.

Upon entering my first semester at Sacramento State I was enrolled in a first year seminar class that had an emphasis on teaching and education. As I knew this is what I wanted to do. The peer mentor that was assigned to me was very persuasive and talked me out of making teaching my major and influenced me into a more broad major, that is how I came across Communication Studies. I excelled in public speaking, loved the rhetoric aspect of what I was learning, and enjoyed critical thinking in small group work. So throughout college I thought that I would go work in a corporate office of some sort and since organizational communications was so broad I would be able to do anything. Upon graduating college, I continued to work as the manager at the retail store I had been managing for 4 years. For the longest time I believed that I would be able to continue within the retail field because I enjoyed the aspect of business, customer relations, and most notably I loved training brand new employees on how to do their job but more importantly how to conduct themselves in the work place. My district manager had sent me to help and train other at different stores so then I could utilize my communication skills and continue to have personal growth, and I figured this was great for my development within the company and to add to my skill set for the retail and corporate industries. I had looked into many careers like corporate consulting, becoming a training and development coordinator, and marketing in sports. All of those career paths seems so interesting to me while I will still managing the retail store I was at. However I thoroughly enjoyed being able to manage my own store and have the freedom of making most of my own rules, so I determined that growing in retail was my best option, I kept on thinking that my job was just like teaching but in another form. And although it was a lot like teaching because I had a sense of fulfillment because I was able to teach other valuable skills and watch their growth and graduation once they would move on, it still was not my passion and dream. In the past three years something never felt right. I thought I was happy because what I was doing was apart of what my major taught me and I felt it was what I was supposed to do but ultimately I was not happy. I had tried to push and keep myself busy into a career that was what I thought I was supposed to do based on my background education, but it was not what my heart was calling me to do. It could not have been a better situation for me personally because the store I managed closed due to bankruptcy in at the end of September 2018, allowing me to solely focus on school and volunteering.

Initially when I came to the conclusion that I would go back to school I felt that I had a few wasted years while I was working and not working towards becoming an elementary school teacher. I felt anger towards the peer mentor I had who influenced me into a different career path however now I am grateful. Now I am at a point where I have never been more sure that teaching is the career that is best for me because it is what I have been searching for to have my own personal happiness. Because teaching has now become a second career path for me I feel I got to experience what was not right in order to fully know what is right. The communication background that I have has prepared me to be a well-rounded educator for my students as well as their parents. By having the opportunity to find something more broad career I have been awarded the knowledge that teaching is what I am passionate about.