I have a story to tell. I attended DePaul University, a Catholic university in Chicago, IL. IN FACT – I attended religious schools for my entire life, minus a brief period at community college. DePaul is the largest Catholic university in the United States.

DePaul centers service, and I attended university thinking that I would work in the psychological counseling or medical services. Both are a far cry from where I ended up as a marketing and communications strategist!

How did this happen?

Well, DePaul sends their students into the Chicago streets to apply their knowledge. My undergrad psych program mentor opened an opportunity for her a handful of her students to work as mentors to students Cabrini Green’s Schiller Elementary–kids I LOVED, but a role for which I found myself woefully underprepared.

Not because DePaul hadn’t taught me solid academics in psychology, but because talking about inequality and seeing American children with math books from the 1980s — that they weren’t allowed to take home — made the experience beyond what I understood we were facing. I ended up spending whatever little money that a sharecropper’s daughter at a private Catholic university has, taking the kids on field trips. They needed to see outside of Cabrini. Simultaneously, my money quickly ran out and I left the project in defeat.

This was first stage of my personal disillusionment with ‘the box’ and my long personal and professional journey to work that moves me beyond the box. I took my psychology BA to a Black-owned African American target market ad agency, E. Morris Communications. As a member of the market research team, I began classes to attend graduate school for nursing.