Rising to a challenge isn’t easy. It requires you to buckle down, do the hard work, and persevere. And at the end of it all? You end up growing exponentially because you stretched the limits of your ability. We all have times in our lives where we encounter something new—sometimes expected, other times blindsiding you. What matters is how you tackle the challenge. This week, we’re looking at how Carmen Vernon rose to the challenge of staffing a convening at the United Nations, branching out from easier, more familiar career paths along the way. She broke the mold of her family and charted her own professional path.
I grew up in a comfortable middle class family on the west side of Indianapolis. My parents met while they were both students at Ben Davis High School; the same high school I graduated from in 2013. After my mom’s high school years, she went to college and became a dental hygienist while my dad opened his own carpentry business. Like my dad’s parents and siblings before him, my dad forewent college.
For the first 18 years of my life, my mom worked at a dentist office five minutes down the street. My dad had an even easier commute: 10 steps out the back door to our detached garage. Outside of my dad traveling to craft fairs and festivals to sell his woodworking pieces, work travel was unheard of in our family.
Growing up with this parent work dynamic, you can imagine the surprise I got when I moved to DC the summer of 2017 to become a fundraising consultant. A traveling requirement seems to be baked into the job description of most consultants. In fact, the work traveling for me started my first week on the job. I traveled to Baltimore two days after I started my position.
Per diem. Client codes. Reimbursements from your employer. Company travel budget. These were all new concepts to me.
In the abstract, I knew people traveled for work. After all, I watched movies, read books, perused the news, and held internships before starting my first full-time job. However, I simply assumed work travel would never fall on my shoulders because the etiquette of work trips was not modeled by my immediate family as I was growing.
Suddenly, I was like the career women I saw in the movies, though. I was the one flitting across the country attending client meetings and running fundraising workshops with my colleagues.
I even landed myself at the United Nations for the IMPACT2030 Summit in September 2018.
Going to the United Nations was big. I would be staffing the event for my client. I was nervous. The attendees were all Fortune 1000 corporate social responsibility professionals. Many were at the C-Suite level, and I, a mere 23 year old, was required to rub elbows with them.
As the trip approached, I forced myself to push down my nerves. I rose to the challenge.
I faced my fears of networking, leading a client engagement, and running a communications campaign all at the same time. Over the three day event, I live tweeted, supported workshop presenters, and prepped event spaces. I was at my clients beck and call, adding value wherever I could.
From that experience, I learned professional and personal growth require you to get out from behind your desk from time to time. Your computer screen and Google can only teach you so much. My first job has exposed me to events and client projects I never could have imagined back in high school, but I am so grateful to have gotten the opportunity to learn from the experiences.
Many people talk about first generation college students. I hear far less people talk about first generation professionals. These are office professionals who grew up in a family with blue collar or service working parents.
I do not consider myself a first generation professional, though, because my grandfather worked for the federal government as an agronomist. He lived in Nebraska, far from my reach or gaze. He was only a fixture in my life around holidays. I did not grow up watching how he interacted with his work life. I did not see first-hand what being an office professional entailed. I also did not get a glimpse of office work from my mom. My dental hygienist mother, while a college graduate, did not have experience in an office setting where networking, productive meetings, and project deliverables are the norm.
This lack of exposure to the customs and norms of white collar America did not hurt me.
Instead, it gave me an even bigger challenge to face.
I conquered that challenge the moment I got over my fear of work travel. I conquered the challenge the moment I walked straight into the United Nations.
Believing that I was important enough to belong there.