My career path has never been smooth, straightforward, or logical. It took two years post-graduation from St. John’s University to land my first office job, and that was a job that had little to nothing to do with my major - I graduated with a BS in Communication Arts and became an Account Manager at a car rental company. After almost three years at that company, I realized that not only was I working in a job that wasn’t anything close to what I had envisioned for myself, I was working for a company whose mission didn’t resonate with me in any way. I started searching for a new career with a company that makes an impact; a company whose mission inspired me.
I came across a job posting for an Outreach Director role at Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, a nonprofit food rescue organization. I had never heard of food rescue before and my work experience was not particularly relevant to the role that was available, but I knew this was the career move I was looking for and needed. A few months later, I began working at Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC). RLC partners with restaurants, schools, and offices to pick up their excess food and deliver it to local human service agencies, where the food is then distributed to the food insecure community. I could talk endlessly about RLC because I’m so proud of the work that we do and incredibly honored to work for an organization that has such an immediate and profound impact, but to keep things brief, I’ll just note that my role has expanded and I’m now the Program Director, overseeing all day-to-day operations.
RLC’s website is absolutely essential to our operations. All of our partners, volunteers, and staff use and engage with the website and its features to complete the 160+ food rescue events that take place on a weekly basis in NYC. Almost a year ago, I took over the role of liaison between operations and our tech development team, which dictates the upgrades and new features needed to maintain and streamline our operations. This is a role that I was, frankly, terrified to take on. My tech background is nonexistent and I didn’t feel like I would be able to communicate with our developers, let alone oversee and prioritize their workload. I quickly developed a great relationship with our tech developer and learned a ton about the amazing possibilities that web development and software engineering provide. I have gained a strong understanding of how best to utilize our tech team’s efforts and, since taking on this role, countless tasks that were previously incredibly tedious and manual have now been automated or eliminated altogether due to the development of our website technology.
Although our tech team is absolutely amazing and has completely transformed our operations, as a nonprofit, RLC is simply unable to allocate the funds needed to take care of both the major features and the minor bugs and maintenance. I applied for Flatiron School’s Software Engineering Boot Camp because we need our developers to be able to focus completely on major and complex features that will take RLC to a new level, but there is a long list of minor inconveniences that have been delayed for over a year now due to the need to prioritize our tech team’s efforts. I want to be able to personally pitch in and fix website bugs that currently delay our tech team’s completion of major features and upgrades, as well as the minor fixes that are low on the list of priorities. I’d love to one day contribute to the development of major features as well!
More than that, I am determined to embrace the newfound confidence I’ve gained while working at RLC and continue to expand and improve upon my general skill set. I’ve never been someone to willingly challenge myself because of a fear of failure or inadequacy, but I’m ready to move past that and prove to myself that I can learn something completely new. I’m so excited to go through Flatiron School’s Boot Camp to challenge myself, dive into something totally unknown, and apply it to my current career and future endeavors.