Reflective Essay: Diversity In The Workplace

A little more than a year ago, I was involved in a terrible work place accident where my primary hand became trapped inside machinery at my place of employment. The end result is that I lost partial use of my right hand, as well as the ring finger; I can no longer make a fist, nor can I hold and manipulate the tools that were necessary for me to provide my family with the income we had come to rely upon to make ends meet. I was stubborn, to say the least, when the surgeon who worked on my hand told me that I would more than likely not be able to return to the work that I had been trained to do. He informed me that I had several months of physical therapy ahead of me before we would have any real answers, so I was not to try and do any more than instructed for the next six months to a year. Wow! Six months to a year is a very long time; what am I going to do with all of the free time that I going to have;

So, I made contact with the professor who talked my ear off and agreed to take the course. Ten weeks into it, I can honestly say that it was the best decision that I have ever made. It may sound cliché, but it has changed my life. I am a Peer Mentor now at Cincinnati State. For ten weeks, I met twice a week with a Freshmen First Year Experience class and helped those students make the transition to college life. Instead of walking around campus with my eyes down, I keep my head up; and I am all over the radar! I am a member of the Leadership Club, an officer in the Psychology Club, and not only am I a member of the campus Phi Theta Kappa organization, I recently returned from a Phi Theta Kappa Ohio Regional Conference where I addressed the entire gathering by presenting our Honors in Action