I graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 2008 with a double major in Spanish and Italian and a minor in Art Studio. Wanting to teach I knew I had to get my masters in Education to acquire the necessary certifications. I chose NYU because they offer a program to get a dual certification in foreign language and ESL education. With certs in two foreign languages and ESL I would be more marketable when looking for a job.
The problem with NYU was that it's a small fortune to attend. I've had a job since I was 11 years old. If there's one thing I know how to do it's work and work hard. I did some research and found out that if you work for NYU Langone Medical Center in the School of Medicine that you get partial tuition remission. I applied to anything and everything and got myself an AMAZING job in the Emergency Department. More on that later.
I lived in a one-bedroom apartment (that we split into a small 3 bedroom) in Stuy Town with one of my brothers, Joe and my cousin, Danny. Joe is a rubyist and one of the few extremely intelligent guys that I know that also happens to have a wonderful, non-droid-like personality. Most evenings he can be found at his standing desk, coding the hours away while singing and dancing to Ghostland Observatory. (Side note, he now owns his own company, Def Method. A future blog about that in the future!) Danny is a kind, hilarious and unabashed soul who enjoys a good time with good people. He shamelessly does and says whatever he is in the mood to do and say. Many times it's something sweet but most of the time it's something so ridiculously funny that you burst out laughing somewhere inappropriate - like an art museum or a school play. It was important to have these knuckleheads in my corner because going to school at NYU, student teaching, and working a full-time job turned out to be a little tricky.
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| Me and Joey - not sure what we're doing here... |
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| Danny during a blizzard in his Estrada glasses. |
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| This is a ninja. |
At NYU I was hired by Jessica Kovac as an assistant to the Faculty Group Practice for the ER. Basically I started doing data entry and a little data analysis. Having zero background in that sorta thing I took every single professional development course that NYU had to offer, which was a lot. They have classes on everything from handling stress to Advanced Microsoft Office. I took them all and I got pretty good at that data analysis thing. So good, in fact, I improved all of the existing programs that we had so that most were automated and the rest were 10 times faster than they were when I started. I was a computer ninja with a black belt in Excel.
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| My coworker, Meaghan, and I winning a Team Achievement award at NYU. |
At that point, my coworker and I struggled with whether to let our supervisor know and risk losing full-time status. In the end, we showed her what we had done and she was so impressed that she not only assigned us new, more interesting projects to work on, but met with us individually to hear about our other interests and helped us seek out opportunities at the hospital that we would enjoy. Whenever anyone asks me who the best boss I ever had was, Jessica Kovac is always my answer; for this reason and many more.
I spent two happy years at NYU as a data analyst and then one kind of insane year where student teaching came into play. I met with Jessica to devise a way that I could fit all three priorities in my life and ended up with a schedule where I got up at 4:30 each morning and got home around 9:30 each night. Jessica reminded me that she already knew how hard of a worker I was and that if I finished what needed to get done to just leave - not to stay the full hours just for the sake of it. She trusted my work. Like I said, best boss ever.
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| Hanging out after class with our teacher. |
Joe and Danny did their best to take the burden off me as well. Danny took over cooking most of the meals and Joe took over the shopping. They split some of the chores but, being the neat freak I am, I still spent a lot of my weekends tidying things up. After the first semester, even with all of that help, I was still a wreck. The culmination of stress and exhaustion happened when I woke up and actually hallucinated. Then later that day I was on my way to meet my mom at Penn to go home for the weekend. I had to stop the bus early and run off to vomit behind a Halal stand in front of Macy's. In December, Macy's is pretty crowded with people looking at the Christmas windows so I was lucky enough to have a great audience for this low-point.
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| Me and Momsie the Bobmsie |
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I'd say if there was a theme for my life that I started to tap into at this point it would be that I can accomplish absolutely ANYTHING that I want as long as I want it badly enough and have my family by my side. No one accomplishes anything great without some support from their loved ones. Whether that means encouragement from your sister, 30 Rock marathons with your mother to clear your head, or Whisky Fridays with your brother and cousin to escape the monotony, you are so much better off if you let those people, who genuinely want to help you succeed, in.
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| Steinhardt graduation, 2011 From Left to Right: Me, Jonna Dowling, Shannon Reilly |
Who knew I wouldn't like teaching?
Join me next week to catch up to present-day Erica. Leaving a job as a teacher after that blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention about $60K in student loans) and following a brand new path.
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