I came into the social sciences (and helping professions!) by accident. As a young adult, I was an artist and musician, and entered college to study design, only to drop out when engineering was introduced. With artistic flare and technical skills in computer graphics, I completed a certificate program and worked as a graphic designer for a division of Nestle (Nespresso) in the Middle East. But at 21, I won the green card lottery and immigrated to the U.S., only to discover that my training and experience was insufficient to land a good graphic design job... The best I could do was an administrative assistant job in a consulting firm that was too small to offer benefits or full-time hours. I did the work and went back to school online, hoping to find something better. After a year and a half, I finally landed a full-time job with benefits, in a human service agency that had just opened a community-based psychiatric rehabilitation program and was working to staff an entirely new office. In my first week at the agency's front desk, I fielded calls and visits from 200 people who relied on these services, but who suddenly found themselves without support because their caseworkers had yet to be hired. These people's stories, coupled with observations on the sometimes-dysfunctional world of public service mental health ultimately led me in a new direction: I changed my major to psychology in the hope of someday having the skills and license I needed to help.

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Over the decade that followed, I worked in some of the most challenging setting in the field, including a state hospital, a psychiatric rehabilitation outreach team, a youth and family wraparound program, and a drop-in center for young adults. I also completed my undergraduate degree (in psychology) and a Master's in counseling. I honed my skill set and interests,specializing in complex traumatic stress treatment, assessment, and forensic services. But the more I learned about the field and its practical realities, the more frustrated I became. This work meant trying to fix systemic problems one person at a time. At one point, working as an outpatient therapist, I found myself spending more time working to change my clients' inappropriate parole conditions than I did actually meeting with them. It was deeply unfair to my clients, and a great recipe for burn out. This realization is what led me to apply for doctoral programs, with the aim of contributing to research (and perhaps, someday, to policy) that could produce lasting, systemic change.

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As a poor Ph.D. student, I took my first adjunct teaching position, and discovered another avenue to bring about that change: the power of mentorship and education to help young people enter the workforce grounded in reality, better prepared, with a more empathic stance and stronger skills to improve the systems they enter. These same goals still guide my work today.