One of the first things I do with a student who’s uncertain about what they might want to study or do for a living is give them the Strong Interest Inventory. While many students take career aptitude tests in high school, the Strong is different because it focuses less on what you would be good at, and more on what you would enjoy.
 
Edward Kellog Strong, Jr. originally developed the test in 1927 with the idea that people who enjoy similar activities and experiences would likely enjoy similar professions. Since 2004, the Strong has been revised to incorporate the Holland Codes typology devised by John L. Holland, delineating professions into six different themes: artistic, social, enterprising, investigative, realistic, and conventional.
 
I was first introduced to the Strong when I was finishing my graduate degree and feeling pretty uncertain as to where I should be aiming career-wise. But rather than spitting out a specific answer to the question, “What should I be when I grow up?” (I think it recommended becoming a librarian, which…sure), the Strong gave me a broader way to organize possible careers, and evaluate my compatibility with them.
 
For the record, I am primarily artistic and social, with a healthy dose of enterprising. And this aligns well with my job, which gives me extensive opportunity to write and think about how to use language for the purpose of expressing your most authentic self. My job is also primarily about one-on-one interactions, and I spend the majority of my time talking individually to students and parents and colleagues about the enormous project that is going to college. And perfectly for me, I get to run my own business and engage a broad range of people on how to successfully navigate the college application process.
 
As a way to introduce this concept, I wanted to provide some examples of When I Was 17 interviewees who represent each theme. But as you’ll see, many jobs have multiple aspects to them. And the key to professional satisfaction may not be solely about finding that magical soul mate career, but in adapting a job to your strengths and priorities.  
 
Artistic:
 
As a working actor, Scott Reardon is a natural example for the artistic theme. Slightly less obvious is Kari Waldrep, who turned her fine arts degree into a successful career in UX design.
 
Social:
 
Social careers are often referred to as helping professions. Marriage and family therapists, like Patricia Robinson, technically fall into this category, but when I asked her about it, she felt much more compelled by the investigative aspects of her job. Social themes are more clearly represented by Jessica Fradono’s first career in human resources.
 
Enterprising:
 
Enterprising careers are fundamentally about persuading people, which could mean starting your own business, like Sari Abdo. Or working behind the scenes on a political campaign, like Jake Levy-Pollans. Or working on a team of lawyers for a multinational corporation, like Katie Chambers.
 
Investigative:
 
The first person who comes to mind when I think about investigative careers is Brittany Dutra, an applied math major and software engineer. But it would be narrow-minded to only see math and science careers as investigative. It can also include market research and data visualization like what Julia Schroth did at Upworthy. Or a higher ed technology analyst like Joyce Kim.
 
Realistic:
 
Realistic sounds like exactly the kind of career your parents want you to get, but it actually has nothing to do with being practical. Rather, realistic careers are about things more than ideas, and concrete steps rather than abstractions, like Kyle Eroche’s work in audio engineering, and Josh Fisher’s first career in mechanical design and 3D drafting.
 
Conventional:
 
Ironically, the people I know who hold conventional careers are among the least conventional people I’ve met. Take for example, Rachel Rife, who works as a project manager for a solar solutions company, but takes her conference calls on the side of a Uruguayan road or outside a café in Prague. Or Cecilia Mason whose job as a fiduciary might be conventional, but whose trailblazing energy that built her thriving business is anything but. 

​Kimmy Brownell is a therapist based in San Diego, CA, which I’m obviously very into as the daughter of a psychotherapist. But what really got me pumped to talk to Kimmy was hearing about her first career as a Broadway-style theater singer/dancer/actress. My adolescence revolved around musical theater, so getting to get all my dorky teenage questions answered by a woman who toured the world playing Sandy in Grease was a dream come true. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 

When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
My friends wanted to go to college, meet somebody, get married, and have the 2.5 kids. I never thought about that. I had one goal - I wanted to be a star. I wanted to go to New York, I wanted to perform, and I wanted to have a non-traditional gypsy lifestyle. It's unusual, I guess, for most 17-year-olds, but there was no other option for me.
 
My mom literally enrolled me in every possible activity. She put me in dance when I was five, and started getting me singing lessons when I was 13, late for a singer. My teacher was an opera singer in downtown Chicago for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and she said “Your daughter's young, but she has something that's different, and you should definitely keep her in this. This could be an option, if she's interested." Nothing in the world gives me the same kind of bliss as singing. I've never felt so close to being me; it’s basically therapy.
 
How did you decide to attend the Boston Conservatory of Music?
 
After high school, I got a full ride and followed a teacher to Ohio State to study classical voice. But we had to go to all these operas and I hate opera. It just was not what I wanted; I missed dancing, I missed acting, so I left and went to the Boston Conservatory of Music.
 
There are five main theater schools that lead into the Broadway community: University of Michigan, which has a conservatory program within it; Cincinnati College-Conservatory, which is at the University of Cincinnati; Carnegie Mellon; Northwestern also has a big program; and my school. I'm from the Midwest, and I wanted to be in the east coast. I've always been super-independent, and I wanted to create myself in a city. In hindsight, I probably wouldn't have gone to a conservatory, because I do feel like I missed out on having a real college experience.
 
Boston Conservatory accepts a small group of people, and they basically cast their class. So they'll cast a few potential ingenues, the sweet, innocent, nice girl, which I looked like, but I wanted to play the mean bitch, or the funny person. Then they would cast the quirky person, who usually has red hair or a non-traditional body type. Same with men.
 
You go through two years of intensive training, and then you have juries. They make you audition again in front of a panel of people, and they decide whether you can stay or not. They kick out maybe half the class, and you don't even get an associate's degree. After you pass your jury, you get ready for showcase. This is a performance that you put on in New York, in front of a whole bunch of agents, and that's how you get an agent. You pretty much have to have a good agent just to get in the door.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I majored in classical voice for a year at Ohio State. But if you want to do Broadway-style stuff, you major in musical theater. So that’s what I did at the Boston Conservatory. But I was always worried about my voice. You can't go out and hang out like the other kids. We couldn't be around smoke, we couldn't drink, because you're judged by every performance that you do, every day, and you're terrified to get sick and mess up your voice. It was the most stressful experience.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
As soon as I graduated, I moved to New York. Summer doesn't really yield a lot of auditions, but there are not as many actors there because they're out doing regional shows. It's a good way to ease yourself into the scene. I would go to singing calls first, and then they'd say, "Come back at 3:00 for the dance call." I was always hauling a suitcase everywhere, like a bag lady. You have tap, ballet, jazz, and lyrical shoes, your leotards, your tights, your makeup, your curlers. You go somewhere to eat lunch, and then you come back and dance. It was a good rhythm.
 
When you start auditioning, all of a sudden you're going here or there at 24-hours notice. I remember I had gone in for Sandy in a Grease production that was touring Europe, and I got it. And they said, "Great. You leave tomorrow." I had just broken up with my boyfriend two days before. I didn't even have a passport; I had never been out of the country. So I got my passport, I packed, and I got on a plane to Amsterdam. I was on the plane, and I just start sobbing hysterically. This man next to me said, "I don't know you, but everything's going to be okay. I just know that." We ended up talking, and he even went through my lines with me.
 
So I lived in Europe for a bit, and did that show. I had the choice of staying on, but they were going to make the musical auf deustch, which means the songs would be in English but the dialogue would be in German. At that point, constantly traveling, living out of a suitcase, being in a foreign country… so I came back home, and that was the end of that. But that experience shaped me as a human. I got so much perspective about how egocentric Americans are, and how differently we live our lives. The Dutch live their lives to be happy. They don't work constantly, their focus is so different from ours. I'm grateful for that experience.
 
Then I ended up doing a national tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, with Jon Secada, which was cool. I played the “Angel in Heaven” wife, and had a little stand-up solo. I wasn’t headlining a show, so I wasn’t under constant pressure that my voice was going to go out, or it wouldn’t be perfect. I could enjoy the experience for the first time. I also toured with The Music Man, and I got to enjoy that experience a little more too. Grease had turned into my steady employment. I did 5 productions of Sandy in Grease between different things. And I did the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.
 
But then 2008 happened, and there were long periods of time that I was out of work. And it was really tough. That business is quite toxic in terms of, you are your resume. You are what you're doing. And if you don't have anything, you're nothing, you feel worthless. Even when you reach the very top. I remember being on stage thinking, "Oh my God, this is what I always wanted to do, and I’m not fulfilled.”
 
I started losing confidence, and feeling like crap about myself. I was going to auditions, and the parts you go in for, you see the same women over and over. And you think, "Am I better than her? What's she done lately?" I remember realizing, "This is a really toxic version of me. I don't like feeling like I have to be in a show to be worth something."
 
So I went to my union, and said, "I want to be in a group with a bunch of artists who are my age who are going through this kind of thing." So I joined this group run by an ex-Miami City ballet dancer. There were New York City Ballet dancers, Metropolitan Opera singers, two musical theater people, and one person that did movies. We were all at the same place in our lives, all around 28 years old, and thinking, "What now?" It ended up being the most positive, amazing thing to connect with these women and not feel so isolated, and that changed my life.
 
I thought, "I want to do this for people." So I asked the woman who ran the group, "Tell me what you did to do this, because I want to work with artists, and I want to be able to empower them, give them a place to go." She said, "I went to NYU, and I majored in clinical social work." And she ended up writing me a letter of recommendation.
 
I've always been interested in psychology. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with acting, because you're always analyzing human behavior. But I also remember being in my classes and being interested in the content, but thinking, "I'm not special anymore. There's nothing that sets me apart. Anyone can do this." So that was a really hard change, harder than I thought.
 
The reason I picked NYU is that half of it is school and half of it is they throw you into all these different situations, and say, "You're a therapist. Go." That's how I learn, so I liked that. And you get a whole variety of different settings, so you can figure out what works for you. One of my internships was with a high school, and I found that I really connected with the high school kids, because a lot of it was anxiety, which I had experience with. And for the first time, I felt like I was making a difference in people's lives. It felt great.
 
So I was working, I was traveling around the city, which I liked because I'm not an office person. I was going into people’s homes, working with families. Then, my life changed pretty fast. My dad had been suffering from congestive heart failure for four years, and his doctor told me he didn’t have much time left. I sublet my place, and I came home to spend the last few months of his life with him. At that point, I had been dating my boyfriend for a year, and he said, "I'll come with you." So we went from living in a city to moving into a house in a sleepy suburb near my parents.
 
I was so fortunate to get to spend time with my dad before he passed away. A few days before he passed away, my boyfriend said, "Your dad should see his daughter get married," which is very kind and wonderful in theory, but terrible in practice. So we decided to do it. We were wearing whatever we could find in our closet and we just went to his hospice bed, and an old man with dementia stole our boutonnieres. But my dad was so happy.
 
So all of a sudden, I'm married and my then-husband had a penchant for moving every year. I said, "You get one move. You can go wherever you want to go, and we'll set up a life there." And he said, "San Diego," so we moved to San Diego. I was dealing with grief, I was dealing with moving away from my family and friends, I felt very isolated here, and it was really hard to find a job. San Diego is not an arts performing city, and those were the clients I wanted to work with. So I started working in an eating disorder center, and very quickly learned that I hated that. We felt isolated, and it was just a bad situation. We ended up buying a house in May, and then in June we separated. It was very difficult, but during the separation period, we ended up becoming incredibly close friends, which I felt so blessed to have that.
 
He ended up going to Europe, and I felt very alone when he left. And I thought, "How do I make friends?" I’d never thought about that as an adult in a new city. I did end up finding a community, but it was very tough. I will also say, California was not a place I wanted to move to, because it's the only state without reciprocity. So I lost my license, and had to regain it. This summer I'm taking all my boards again, and I'm opening a private practice along with my day job doing outpatient psychiatry at a children’s hospital.
 
I've been asked if I would ever perform again, and I enjoy singing for myself and I do love performing, but I don't know. I still haven't dropped my card, I still haven't technically dropped my agent, I can't let go of all of it. Being in New York, you're so close to Broadway so it's very hard to let go. Moving out here, I miss it, but it was easier to free myself of that. And I was surprised to realize that, even though my audience has shrunk considerably, singing is still like meditation. I am completely in myself and present. I am my most raw, vulnerable self. I love that, and I'll always have that.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
We learn the most about ourselves, and we change and evolve as human beings from falling on our asses. I really think that learning to be resilient as an adult is invaluable, and going through those experiences, moving, watching my father die, getting married, moving again, getting a divorce, all within two years, that really changes you.
 
The biggest thing I'd change is not taking myself so seriously. Like, it's musical theater; no one outside of New York knows or cares what the hell it is. That was so eye-opening to me. This thing that was my entire life? It's not even a speck on most people’s radar. I would go back and tell myself, "This is not a big deal. This is just an audition. You'll be fine."
 
I catch myself being complacent sometimes, and I have to remind myself, "Look at this. This is beautiful. I'm so lucky to be around this." And that's still my goal, to learn to be present. Stop worrying about the future, and just let yourself be. You're gonna fall on your butt, and you're gonna fail, and you're gonna be fired, and you're gonna make mistakes, but those are 100% more important than your successes. Try to show yourself the same kindness that you show your friends and family. Learn to be resilient.
 
My thesis in grad school was focused on this Harvard 75-year study of happiness – there’s a TED talk on it and it's life-changing. It actually quantifies and qualifies what happiness is after following people for 75 years. And they found that, as long as you get your basic needs met, the things that matter the most in your life are feeling like you're of service in any way, it's having people around you and being connected to others, it’s learning to communicate. It's much easier said than done, but get that because it becomes so important in your life.

This week, I’m celebrating my cousin, Devon’s, graduation from Santa Clara University (woo!), and like the good student that I am, I’m preparing by watching some of this year’s commencement speeches. I *love* a good commencement speech. A well-crafted speech can be inspiring, emotional, and give you insight into the struggles that even celebrities face in between moments of dazzling success. And maybe I’m partial to the art of the commencement speech because its objectives are very similar to my goals for “When I Was 17.”
 
One of my favorites this year was Mindy Kaling’s address at Dartmouth, particularly the end:
 
"I will tell you a personal story. After my daughter was born in December, I remember bringing her home and being in my house with her for the first time and thinking, “Huh. According to movies and TV, this is traditionally the time when my mother and spouse are supposed to be here, sharing this experience with me.” And I looked around, and I had neither. And for a moment, it was kind of scary.
 
[…]But then, that feeling went away, because the reality is, I’m not doing it by myself. […] And the joy I feel from being with my daughter, Katherine, eclipses anything from any crazy checklist.
 
I just want to tell you guys, don’t be scared if you don’t do things in the right order, or if you don’t do some things at all. […] If you have a checklist, good for you. Structured ambition can sometimes be motivating. But also, feel free to let it go. Yes, my culminating advice from my speech is a song from the Disney animated movie, Frozen. I’ve covered a lot of ground today, not all of it was serious, but I wanted to leave you with this: […] Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, but especially not yourself."
 
I also cheered the feminism invoked in USA women’s national soccer team member, Abby Wambach’s, speech at Barnard (shared with me by my recent interviewee, Cecilia Mason):
 
"Like all little girls, I was taught to be grateful. I was taught to keep my head down, stay on the path, and get my job done. I was freaking Little Red Riding Hood.
 
You know the fairy tale: […] Little Red Riding Hood heads off through the woods and is given strict instructions: Stay on the path. Don’t talk to anybody. […] And she does… at first. But then she dares to get a little curious and she ventures off the path. That’s of course when she encounters the Big Bad Wolf and all hell breaks loose. The message is clear: Don’t be curious, don’t make trouble, don’t say too much or BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.
 
I stayed on the path out of fear, not of being eaten by a wolf, but of being cut, being benched, losing my paycheck. If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this: “Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf.”
 
BARNARD WOMEN—CLASS OF 2018—WE. ARE. THE. WOLVES.
 
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for."
 
But my all-time favorite commencement speech is Steve Jobs’s Stanford address from 2005. I would very much encourage you to spend the 15 minutes it takes to read it, but in case you can't, here is the part that always gives me chills:
 
"[A]ll of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. […] So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
 
[…]Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. […] Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
 
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. […] Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later."
 
I’ve talked about this speech before, but it’s worth bringing up specifically in the context of “When I Was 17.” I’m not encouraging people to drop out of college, or spend all their parents’ money to attend a prestigious university. But I am encouraging you to leave a little space in your education, in your career, and in your life for mystery. Read any one of these interviews and you’ll see that the greatest moments of growth, insight, and success happened when people didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next, or when they took an unexpected left turn away from their plans. These moments are often the most unsettling, but as Jobs points out, looking back, they make perfect sense. 

Katie Chambers is a tax lawyer at Chevron, an A+ aunt to her five nieces and nephews, and one of my favorite people to run into while out walking my dog. One of the first things I remember noticing about Katie is how clearly she loved her work. People make a lot of jokes about lawyers (particularly tax lawyers), but Katie is the perfect example of the idea that the key to a fulfilling career is not doing what other people think you should do - it’s following what makes sense for you.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
When I was 12, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. In grade school, I had wanted to be a teacher, and then I wanted to be a stewardess. One of my mother's cousins was a judge and another cousin was a lawyer. I watched them, and I went to a trial with one of them and I was very intrigued.
 
How did you decide to attend Rider College (now Rider University)?
 
I knew I was going to law school, and so I decided to commute up to New Jersey [from my parents’ house] to save money. And so Rider was one of the options where I could do that.
 
I loved Rider. It was a great school, I met a lot of great people, and I got a really good education. I also started a peer counseling center. I had done a lot of tutoring in high school and college, and I’d read some articles about it. So we got space in the student center and got some peer counselors and started it up.
 
I remember going to the Dean of Students, and I told him that I wanted to go to a peer-student counseling conference in Peoria, Illinois. He told me he knew I must be really committed to the project to want to go to Peoria, Illinois [laughs].
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I started as an economics major, and then after the first semester I switched to accounting. I was always good at math, so it was a natural fit. And I decided it would go better with a law degree. And probably because around that time, I decided I wanted to be a tax lawyer.
 
I liked tax law because there is a pattern, a series of rules that you follow, and I'm a rule follower by nature. I strongly believe in a defendant's right to a trial, but I knew that I couldn’t defend somebody. And I thought, with family law, I'd get too engaged in all the family’s problems and child abuse and neglect, and I wouldn't be able to shut it down when I went home. But tax law is very technical, very logical, and it’s constantly changing and evolving.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
After I graduated, I went directly to the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law [in Sacramento]. I’d wanted to go there ever since I was 14 or 15. I never totally understood what drew me to McGeorge. I was born in Sacramento, so I had a bond there. And when my mother's mother died, one of her sisters told me that she had gone to McGeorge. So I think on some subliminal basis, I had a tie there.

​I got a really good education there. Law school just teaches you how to think differently. I remember before I went to law school, everybody told me that something happens between the first year and second year when suddenly, everything makes sense. In my first year, everything was still hard. I would read a case three times and I still wouldn't get it sometimes. But in the second year, everything clicked.
 
I got internships at a few local law firms in New Jersey where my parents lived. I liked them, none of them was really big on tax law so I didn’t think it was long-term. When I finished law school, I got a job working at KPMG in their tax department in New York City. For the first nine months, I commuted from my parent's house, which when everything worked, was two hours each way. That was a horrible commute. And then I moved to northern New Jersey, and it only took about an hour to get in.
 
I worked in that office for four years. It was intense and a lot of hours. In the tax department, I would look at a client’s transactions and look at the tax expenses, and them advise them on what they could do differently. You can change the amount of taxes that way. If we had a client going through an IRS audit, I would go through the IRS assessment and then figure out how to prove to the IRS that they're wrong and my client was right.
 
After New York, I worked in Cincinnati for a little less than two years. I had been in New York City for a while, and I didn't really want to stay there. And the client I was working for was based in Cincinnati, so that’s why I went there. And then the Cincinnati office had some partners leave and I said was willing to transfer, so I went to the San Francisco office for a year.
 
I loved San Francisco, but I was tired of KPMG. A man that I worked on a big client with at KPMG had gone to FedEx and established their tax legal group. He called me one day and asked me if I was interested in coming to work for him. So I moved to Memphis and worked for FedEx.
 
Memphis is a hard place to not be from. Most people who live there have been there since day one. It was really hard to make lifelong friends, but I do have some amazing friends after being there for 13 years.
 
FedEx is a great company and I had great experience there. I got to do some amazing things from the tax perspective. Like I won a major case against the IRS that went to the Sixth Circuit Court and established tax law in whether or not something was a repair cost or an improvement to an asset. I’m really proud of that.
 
So I was with FedEx for 13 years. I was working constantly and I had no life, and I didn't know if I could change that there. I felt like I needed a break. I had gone to a spa after I had decided that I was going to leave. I wrote down how I envisioned my life, and I wanted to live in a place where I had really good friends, I wanted to live in a place where I could walk to Starbuck and walk to lots of places, I wanted to be able to sit in my bedroom and look at water and birds. So I wrote all of this down, and after I got the job at Chevron and I came back to California, I looked back at it six months later and I realized that everything I had written had come true.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I would say that it’s important to set boundaries. It is okay to have a life. You don't have to solely do work. And it is important to be well-rounded. You don't want to say at the end, "I missed all this stuff because I wasn't there." One of the things that I am most proud of in my life is being an aunt to five wonderful children, and now, young adults, as well as the numerous friends, whose lives I've been allowed to be a part of over the years. It has enriched my life immensely and it's a great thing.

Cecilia is a fiduciary with her own small business executing the trusts and estates of a wide variety of people here in the Bay Area. Her story is my favorite kind, of people who didn’t find their calling until further down their career paths. But somehow, when you look back, the dots line up in such an unexpectedly straight line. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
Probably the most honest answer would be I had no idea, but my family was in the radio business, and my grandfather was retired editor in chief of the Columbus Ledger Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia. My grandfather was amazing. I had to write a paper about the person I admired most, and I wrote it about him. He wrote a column for the paper called “Our Town” until he was 86. He was just amazing. And my parents built that radio station from the ground up. So I felt like journalism would be my path, and I would do something in that.
 
How did you decide to attend University of Georgia?
 
I looked at about six schools, but I only applied to one  - University of Georgia. I grew up on Georgia football. Every weekend during the season, we would meet my aunts and uncles at the games. And Georgia was a good school and it was only 20 minutes from my house.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I got accepted into the journalism school at the University of Georgia, and I did graduate with a degree in journalism. But I also got married and had my daughter when I was in college. I was very lucky that my father-in-law really wanted me to finish my degree.
 
My dad thought I should be at home with my daughter, even though my mother worked every single day. So I decided to add a minor in home economics. I learned sewing and took classes in decorating and art history. I was probably one of the only people to ever graduate with that a degree in journalism and home economics [laughs].
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
[My husband and I] moved to Winder, Georgia, and my husband got a job at a bank in Winder, and I went to work for Daddy. I scheduled programming for the station, and had a few little programs that I did. So I brought home a paycheck, but when I wanted to do something, I could. And my mother was probably the worst promoter of "Celia, we're not going to work this morning. We're going to go do this." So, it was more like charity I think at the time. But it wasn't my calling; I knew that it wasn't where I wanted to be.
 
And I knew my husband was miserable working at the bank in Winder, Georgia, and that he did not want to stay in Winder. So as much as I loved having a built-in babysitter all the time, we ended up moving down to Thomasville, Georgia three years later. And I fell in love with Thomasville, and ended up just having the best time ever there.
 
I immediately got a job working in Family and Children's Services for the State of Georgia. My first position was determining eligibility for food stamps. I learned and awful lot, and the people I worked with were awesome. I still have good friends from that I worked with there.
 
We also had two more children while we were in Thomasville. Once I got pregnant, I left Family and Children's Services. It just wasn't going to work with two and then three kids. By this time, my husband had decided that he didn’t like working in a bank, and that he was going to be a dog trainer working on a plantation. I didn't care – I was fine being a plantation worker's wife, and the home was provided. But we were not wealthy. So I took part-time jobs doing whatever I could to bring in money.
 
I ended up working for the 1979 pre-list census, canvassing an area and finding households, so everything was ready for the next year. I was a supervisor, so I hired staff and sent them out to canvas the area and meet people and have them fill out the forms. It was all done by hand, on foot.
 
Then, my husband finally took a decent job. The dog training didn't last very long, so he took a job working for a company called Davis Water and Waste. They made everything that goes under the roads and up to the house for gas and water. He flourished there, and after 10 years they transferred him up to Raleigh, North Carolina.
 
I was just devastated because I had so fallen in love with Thomasville. My mother and father-in-law lived there, and they were always there for us with the children.
But my motto is “bloom where you're planted.” I have felt that way my entire adult life, and I made up my mind I was going to be happy wherever I was. Because it is a choice.
 
So we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and my husband had a great job, but I was still floundering and looking around and trying to figure out what to do. I went back to my experience working for the Department of Family and Children Services, and
I was working in what you would think of as the welfare. I started out as a fraud investigator, finding and prosecuting the cheaters. And I just fell in love with law.
 
I was thoroughly enjoying what I was doing, and then one of the cases I worked on, my boss ordered me to prosecute a 96-year-old woman who was on welfare because her brother had stolen money from her. Technically, she was ineligible, and he insisted that I recommend prosecution, and I refused. It was against my morals.
 
So then I went to the head of the nursing home eligibility unit and asked if they had a position for me. They put me in as a supervisor over the division that determines eligibility for benefits while in a nursing home, which sort of leads me to where I am and what I've been doing.
 
I worked for Social Services for five years, and I loved it, but the legal part was still nagging at me because I had fallen in love with it. There was something in me that, found it very intriguing. I decided that I was going to take a leave of absence to go to paralegal school.
 
I went to Meredith College, a girl's school in Raleigh. I was probably the oldest in my class, but I was also the top of my class. My specialty was trust and estate administration. One of the professors saw something promising in me, and he really helped me along. Years later, he actually came to me and said, "I want to retire from teaching. Will you take my classes?" So I ended up teaching paralegal classes at Meredith.
 
When I graduated, I went to work for a law firm, which I loved. The first job they put me in didn't have anything to do with trust and estate administration; they had me researching real estate titles in the courthouse. Every day I went all the way downtown, and I opened up the real estate deed vault and turned on all the computers for the people that worked there because I always got there early. The more difficult ones were the ones I just loved. The title searches just led me to so many places.
 
I did that for a while, and then they put me in domestic, which was divorces.
Only, I was going through a divorce at the same time and it was overload for me. I went to them and said, "You've got to transfer me." They decided they were wasting me since I was considered the estate and trust specialist all over the county, so I finally got to go into estate and trust administration, and I loved it.
 
Under the supervision of an attorney, I could settle estates after somebody passed away or handle a trust and what the document says to do in that trust. It just opened up a whole new world for me. Every estate was different. You learned something about that person and what they did. There could be a shopping center in the trust, and you had to manage the business side of the shopping center. I absolutely loved that kind of work.
 
But there was a drawback. After five years at the law firm, I couldn’t go any further. I wasn't getting any retirement. By that time, I had gotten a divorce. I had nothing that was going to build for my future; everything up to that point was building for our future, for my husband's future, not mine. I went to them and I said, "I've got to have some kind of a retirement. And they said, "Okay. We will put money in a CD account in your name, but you have to keep it a secret," so that none of the other paralegals would catch wind of it. But I couldn't do it, I couldn't go that low.
 
So I found a job working in the trust department of a local bank and worked there for five years. Many times in that five years, I would have a trust client where we were handling her trust because she was old and couldn't handle paying her bills, so I did it. I started thinking, these people need somebody to hold their hand. They don't need a trust officer that's just going to pay their bills and not pay attention to them. They need somebody that's going to be right there.
 
So I got this idea for starting my own business. I knew I couldn't handle a trust or estates without being under an attorney, so I couldn't go out and hang my shingle up and say that I was a fiduciary. But I incorporated, I did everything totally by the books, and started a business where I would go into people's homes and take care of their affairs. I called it Personal Administrative Service, and I looked at it as I was the one in the middle with the client. I helped the client interface with the attorney, the CPA, the trust officer, the insurance agent, all the important people in their lives.
 
I ran a successful business for 15 years, and I had five employees at one time. I was in an association called National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). I served as treasurer for three years, one year as vice president, and one year as president. I became pretty well-known in the area, and I had attorneys that would turn to me for estate and trust advice. It was a wonderful experience running my own business.
 
And then I met Bob, we got married, and we moved to California. I had to shut my business down. I had two ladies that I had mentored as part of NAWBO who I was able to turn all my clients over to. Before I moved, I found out that California has licensing for fiduciaries. Meaning I could handle trusts and estates without an attorney, which is a really good thing because I had 25 years of fiduciary experience working at the law firm, the bank, and on my own.
 
When I moved to California, I immediately got in touch with the Professional Fiduciary Association. I joined and then started learning about the licensing and started studying for it. Within six months, I had passed both the national exam and the State of California exam and became a licensed fiduciary. I hung my shingle up for the first time in my life. It gave me great satisfaction to be able to say, "I can do this and I can do it on my own.”
 
I joined a mentoring group, and my first client came from my mentor. She was a wonderful woman, she taught me so much about the specifics to California because each state’s estate and trust laws are different. I did have to bone up on probate laws in California, but I'd done that before. I knew what to do. And the legal side is still a big part of what I do.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I have so many times wished that I could have gone to law school. But the only reason I was able to go to paralegal school was because I inherited just enough money, and I also had a daughter that was starting college at the same time, and two other children. So it was just not possible.
 
I think early on I probably would have looked out for myself a little better. I just never thought that I would find myself single again, and I would have looked out for myself a little bit better. I would have been more cautious of, like when I worked at
places like Family and Children Services, I would have reinvested the retirement into something just for me. I would make sure that my future was a little more secure.
 
And realize as you are changing jobs that every single thing you do is for a reason, and there will be eventually some benefit on the end. For instance, with me, everything I did led to coming to California and finding out I could hang out my shingle. Every new job, every move, it completely calls for a reinvention. Every job I had, everything I did as a mother, everything leads me to where I am today.
Every single little detail.