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About Me
My Name is Brianne Anderson. I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah where I attended Olympus High School before moving on to earn my Associates Degree from SLCC then my Bachelors from UVU. Throughout my school years, I never had a direct career path in mind. I found I had the opposite problem of most people, because I found every career and major deeply fascinating, and I didn't want to just pick one! (or two, or three...)
I attended Salt Lake Community College after high school, where I earned my Associates Degree in General Studies. By choosing a broad degree, I was able to explore everything that I loved: science, history, and literature. As I worked full time while going to school full time, I made little time for anything else but homework, my full time job, and my 2 cats.
A couple years later with my Associates Degree newly hanging on the wall beside me, I came to the stark realization that I needed to make a choice, at that very moment, at 11:00pm on the night applications were due to UVU for Fall Semester. My time was up, and I wasn't any closer to choosing just one thing that I loved. I wanted it all!
I scrolled through my transfer application, and the possibilities seemed endless. I found myself recalling all the jobs I had ever had, and what they all had in common.
At 14, I served dinner at a retirement home. I hated the dishes and filling glasses with ice, but I always loved showing new hires how to fold the napkins or who liked which flavor of ice cream for dessert. Through high school, I worked retail at a popular home and kitchen store, where I detested stocking shelves and denying expired coupons. But, I loved training people on the perfect way to fold a towel and how to crease the fluffy comforters just right. The secretarial job followed soon after- I was uninterested in the data checking, but I looked forward to creating new and exciting ways for people to learn what our services were all about.
As an adult, I worked sales for a health food company. I felt guilty asking for people's money, but I loved training new coworkers on the computers systems and cheering each other on for our monthly sales goals.
Every year or so, I would get bored of my job and my mind would start to wander elsewhere. I had jumped from field to field, and never found my niche. Nearing midnight, my college application was missing one single selection from the drop down menu. I knew this because I had already attempted submitting it with the MAJOR category blank, leading me to lose my application entirely and hastily re-type it with minutes to spare.
In this existential moment, I realized all my jobs had one thing in common. I loved teaching people. I could never wrap my head around cleaning dishes, or being #1 in sales, but I felt a deep satisfaction in seeing others get "the light bulb" when they learned something new. I browsed the education majors, and submitted my application declaring "Secondary Education- English". I never looked back, and I've found what I had been looking for in a career.
"The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away." William Shakespeare