It was my sophomore year, and the first day of a class called Professional Portfolio Development. The professor informed us that we would be participating in mock interviews: first with our fellow classmates, then with some of PWID’s board members, both on the phone and in person. I was 17 years old. I had only ever worked online, aside from my job at a bakery. I felt about as inexperienced as one could be.

My editing internship at an economics office this summer required that I dabble in free market philosophy. I had been trying to read one meaty article, scratching through the pages with underlines and question marks and brief abstractions of the text. But what I found at the end of this scholarly essay was a line of music, of rhythm, timbre, pitch.

In that moment as I stood in front of my professor, I knew I was over-committing. He offered me the opportunity to work on a professional client project. This specific client was the nursing department at Cedarville University, and I would be creating a template for their quarterly newsletter.