Using Your Research Skills Where You Are

Happy New Year, Genealogists!

I haven't been thinking much about my blogging or my research in general in the last few months. It's on my mind but has been moved to a back burner while I focus on the history that is going on around me. 

In my day to day life, I work as a Behavior Interventionist for a local elementary school in my city. I work through tough emotions with even tougher kids who have trauma and ill suited coping mechanisms for the problems they encounter in their day to day lives. It's hard but I love it. A lot. And the freedom that school hours and regular breaks gives me allows me to follow my passions in ways that other positions would not. 

Although I love my job, I won't lie and say that I don't wish I worked somewhere where my passions were my main focus. Maybe that will come someday but for many people that isn't quite a reality. And sometimes passions ARE meant for your free time when it doesn't become a chore. I think it's all based on the individual and what they need. 

But I do think that no matter where you are in your career there may be room for your true interests to shine. Here's the story of how mine did just that. 

My school was built in the 50's and has been going strong since then. But as our district grows, the need for space outweighs the need to keep these old buildings and neighborhood schools. Due to this, our school is being torn down and almost 70 years worth of history is going along with it. Unless we can help that. 

In honor of the school we call home and the decades of families and staff who cared for it, we want to celebrate this last year of our school well. 

Therefore, we are doing it up right. We have plans to host an open house where we will have each room be one decade of our schools history, we are allowing kids to earn the right to decorate a brick in the school's hallway, we encouraged teachers and students to put their hand prints outside their classrooms during our parent teacher conferences, and myself and two other staff members are helping our students create a final yearbook for our school. On top of all those things, I have begun heading up a "memory book" to collect documents, photos, newspaper clippings, interviews, and more from Portland's history. I may not be able to work at a museum, archive, or library,  (for now) but I am able to use my skill set and my passions in a way that benefits the good people of my community. 

It has been an honor and a reminder that you have to do what you can, where you are, with what you have. All of us do.

How do you find ways to incorporate your "outside of work" passions into "at work" projects?

Did you make the switch from a career outside of your passions to one where you are immersed in them every day? How did that go and what have you learned?

Love always and happy hunting, 

Morgan