To sum it up...

         After graduating form the University of Texas at Austin in 2009 I was passionate, excited, enthusiastic, and ready to take on the world, but doing what? I had no idea. Instead of getting a 9-5 job crunching numbers or entering data, I decided to take the road less travelled and go live in Spain for a year. I would sip espresso with relatives of Picasso in the morning, and then discuss the finer points of the Spanish revolution with the King at night. And that’s exactly how it happened. Well, at least the espresso part.

             I did end up going to Spain, but it was in a small town teaching English, and sadly, the King was nowhere to be found. The great thing about being in a small town, though, was that I was one of about five Americans in a twenty-mile radius, providing an excellent opportunity to practice Spanish. You would think that being from Texas where a large percentage of the population is bilingual, Spanish would just roll off my tongue - and it did, but it rolled the way that a lopsided bowling ball rolls into the gutter. However, I pressed on and am now almost completely fluent.

             After my stint in Spain, I was back in America where I was able to delight once again in the beautiful thing that is called Tex-Mex. Then it was time to go abroad again, but this time I was headed the other direction to Southeast Asia. I was headed to Cambodia.

             While there, I worked for an NGO (non-governmental organization) that works with Cambodians from difficult backgrounds. If you know anything about Cambodia, the term “difficult background” describes the vast majority of the population. When the mass genocide took place brought on by the Khmer Rouge regime, the country was put to a standstill. There was no more government, economy, education, arts, there was nothing except hurting people dying of starvation and easily curable diseases.

             The NGO I was working for trains Khmer people in business and hospitality skills using restaurants. My hand in that was to create a digital system to centralize and make more accountable their inventory & purchasing methods, and then train the employees on how to use it. It was a really cool opportunity to get to work directly with the Khmer people and use my communication and business expertise to contribute to what they were already doing there. But more than that, I learned the value of persevering when it seems impossible to go on.

             The people in Cambodia have been through more than you and I will probably ever go through, and the most amazing thing is that you would never know it. They are an amazing people, and they don’t understand what it means to give up. Meanwhile, the hardest part in my day was when Trader Joe’s didn’t have the kind of Greek yogurt that I wanted.

             And now I’m in New York City. Much like when I graduated from college, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to end up doing here. However, this time I have a much clearer direction and focus. I know that whatever I do, I want to use the skills and resources that I’ve been given to do good in the world. I want to make a difference.