Has anyone ever asked you about your professional mission? Did you pause after you read that sentence to wonder if you have one? This year I took time to develop a professional mission and vision statement. This reflection outlines the very “me” process of getting there, and what I do with it now.

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I’m in research mode, pulling together articles for a paper I’m writing on how food justice movements can inform the campus food bank movement. Anthropology, Educational Leadership, Sociology, Biology, Public Policy – in the end disciplines all start to connect to one another. Picking up the next article on the pile, I took pause. It was from a stack handed me by a faculty member, so I’d not really taken time to look at it until that moment. There was something vaguely familiar about it. As I scanned the piece I realized I’d read it before…probably 12 years ago…when I was an undergraduate.

Realizing my thoughts and interests had serendipitously come full-circle made me reflect on my work in concert. I’ve never really considered myself a person with a unified or intentional goal, except to make the world a better place. In reality THAT is such a large and amorphous goal, it’s pretty much meaningless to try and operationalize it. However, that was my ideal when I attended Clark University as a student in International Development and Social Change. I chose Clark for many reasons, one of which was I was enamored by the tagline, “Challenge Convention, Change Our World.” I loved that notion – I still do.

Since graduation I’d gone from aspirations of doing community development abroad, to working as a hall director, to helping troubled teens in the wilderness, to where I am now, running an office focused on poverty, hunger, homelessness, and food insecurity among college students. When I say it like that, none of it really seems connected. I promise it is. This piece is about reflection, and that’s what I started doing when this article came across my desk. I asked myself some questions:

– Is this all connected, if yes, what’s the connection?
– Are there guiding principles in the work I am doing? If so, what are they?
– If I’m answering YES to these questions, and I can explain each, what comes next?

YES, this is all connected. By what? The short answer is me. This is the path I’ve taken, so clearly I’m a common thread. That said, when I answered next question, the quality of that connection became stronger. I realized for me, each of these endeavors, is linked to my underlying values system: social and economic justice, access to advancement, and education – particularly higher education. I wanted to engage in development work to create community capacity so people could be better educated. As hall director I advocated to ensure students could afford their housing and dining. At the wilderness program I was often the first person to tell these “at risk” youth they could go to college. In my work now I focus on access, retention, and graduation for low-income students.

So what next, now that I’ve better defined who I’ve been as a professional? I took what I’d gleaned in this thought process drafted this professional mission and vision statement:

My professional mission is to increase economic access for students to higher education.

It is my vision that when I end my career, I will look back and know more students were able to graduate because of my work.

I mentally draw Venn diagrams when I look at grad programs, jobs, committee invitations, press inquiries, and presentations. It can all be held up to my mission. Knowing how well-aligned these things are helps me to determine if I should devote time to it, and how much. There are days when I want to veer off the path and pursue other things, but I know I’ll end up back in this wheelhouse. I’ve done so up until now without even thinking about it, so I’ll embrace it. Perhaps it WILL help me change the world, make it a better place.

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> BONUS <

Podcast With Valerie Heruska on SA Professionals Role in Development Efforts