(This is part one of the My Story series.)
Before I tell you how I left Corporate America, I’d like to start out with how I got there in the first place.
It was March 2005. A time before Twitter and before I even knew blogs existed. My husband was doing a post-doc at the University of Illinois – Champaign/Urbana and we were living in central Illinois, surrounded by corn fields. The corn fields stifled my essence and suffocated by soul.
It was also a time when I only had one little baby, when our expenses were low, and when I was able to work part time and be home with my little one part time. Being home with my little one was amazing, but otherwise, I was going stir crazy.
My part time job was becoming more and more menial, so I decided to quit and be independent contractor. I got a few gigs and spent a lot of time searching online for contract positions. During my freelance job hunt, I saw a job opening just outside of Chicago.
The job description for this corporate training consulting position looked exciting, intellectually stimulating, and it promised 10-15% travel (not too much time away from my family, but enough to be able to jump on a plane for a few adventures).
Long story short….I applied and got the job, which came with the largest starting salary of my career!
Ka-Ching!
By mid-April, we packed up our house and moved from Cornfield, USA, to Chicago’s North Shore.
And by May, 2005, I was a full-time working mom and corporate training consultant for Fortune 500 companies. A new chapter of my life began to unfold.