Gift 11 ~ Blooming Recommitment / Tour and Career Advice

Gift 11 (March 29) comes at a time when Cami is not in a great mood. Bills are stacking up, and she and her husband sit down to figure out exactly where they stand. Debt is mounting and their savings is dwindling, and Cami just realized how bad it was getting. Their frustration escalates to arguing, her asking her parents for a loan upsets Mark, and Cami decides to go for a walk, two times around the block and then down Sunset Boulevard to a grocery store a couple blocks away. Standing in the flower department smelling the roses, she realizes the good things that started since beginning her gift experiment. She buys some flowers and on her way home, gives some away as gifts to two strangers. She makes her way home where her and Mark make up, and she enjoys the rest of the flowers knowing that two other women in L.A. have the same flowers in their house this evening.

My gift this day is to spend time with two groups of students to educate them on the role of the Federal Reserve (where I work) and to share stories and career advice. The first is a group of home school children who spent two hours in our Learning Center and Money Museum and an hour with a luncheon program that I hosted.  Prior to this, the event coordinator and her family get a bonus of a personal tour of the building, which includes a kids-favorite viewing of the Cash operations and the automated robots at work. The second was a group of University of Akron students who are members of the Financial Management Association (FMA). This is as much a gift to me as it is to them, since I owe my current job to the connection I made at an FMA networking event held when I was a student on campus.