Career Path of a Project Director at PATH Ventures

I went to Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit university in Los Angeles. A core tenet of Jesuit education is focusing on learning outside the classroom.

So, I was very busy with non-academic activities and gaining experiences during college. First and foremost, I did a significant amount of volunteer work in my community. I worked at a domestic violence shelter for women and children who had been displaced.

I also worked at a food pantry, distributing food and meals to people who were food insecure and often homeless. I believe this gave me good context for what I would eventually do in my career.

Aside from that, I worked at the student newspaper. I started as a copy editor and worked my way up to executive editor, where I wrote board editorials and covered many different topics. My involvement in student media led to an internship in London through the political science department.

Although I wasn't a political science major, some of my writing connected me with a professor who secured me an internship working in the UK parliament. This gave me some exposure to politics. I was also majoring in business and music at the time, so I was involved in a little bit of everything in college: business, music, and politics, alongside many extracurriculars.

By the end of college, I had many different potential career paths. I worked for a year at an executive search recruiting firm in Los Angeles. However, it wasn't what I ultimately wanted to do.

I reflected on my volunteer work from college and decided I wanted to return to helping my community. I quit that job and volunteered for a year through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a program that places recent graduates in volunteer positions with nonprofits nationwide.

I was placed with an affordable housing developer in Chicago and moved there. I spent a year learning the intricacies of real estate development, specifically affordable housing. This field is highly dependent on public policy, navigating bureaucracy, and public funding.

After my year-long placement ended, I decided I wanted to continue this work at a higher level. So, I applied to graduate school at UCLA, earning a master's in Urban and Regional Planning with a concentration in housing policy and design and development.

During the summer between my first and second year, I completed an internship, referred to as fieldwork, at a nonprofit affordable housing developer in Los Angeles. I have been working there ever since.

So, that's essentially my career journey. I'm now working in real estate development, similar to before my master's degree, but with significantly more context and education, and at a higher level. That is my career path.