FEATURES: Young, smart and fabulously employed
The ‘temp’
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Nattasha Charania ’08 is pictured in the neonatal intensive care unit at Emory University Hospital Midtown in Atlanta. |
Nattasha Charania ’08 gave herself three months to find a job.
After graduating with a master’s degree in social work, she moved to Atlanta, crashed in a friend’s apartment and circled July 31 on the calendar.
If she was still unemployed after three months, she would pack her bags and head back to Florida.
"It can be depressing at times but I love the mix of my job. It can be emotionally charged but it's never boring."
“I did my bachelor’s and master’s in Miami, so I never really left since my family moved there when I was six,” she says. “I think I was feeling the need to do something out of my comfort zone and I thought a move would be good, just for a change and a challenge.”
Looking back, maybe “challenge” wasn’t a strong enough description of what lay ahead.
Charania treated her search for work like a full-time job. She woke up at 8 a.m., took her laptop down to Starbuck’s and spent the rest of the day researching jobs, sending out résumés and cold-calling potential employers.
When that produced nothing but dead ends she drove around town looking for social service agencies that may not have shown up in her research. She called them, but the response was the same – not hiring.
After nearly three months that produced just two interviews that went nowhere, a return trip to Miami seemed inevitable.
“I was miserable. I’m not good when I’m not working,” Charania says. “It wasn’t fun, especially after the hectic schedule of being in grad school and having internships and working and juggling all those things. It was really weird to be idle.”
Charania was just days away from her July 31 deadline when a social services temp agency called and offered her a job covering for a social worker out on maternity leave at Emory University Hospital.
After three months Emory offered Charania a permanent position.
“I didn’t think it would work out as a full-time job. I just thought it would be a good stepping stone for what comes next,” she says. “But I think a lot of internships translate into jobs. I really think networking helps.”
Charania works in Emory’s Special Care Nursery, a neonatal intensive care unit. She helps families access the resources they need like insurance or Medicaid, puts them in touch with chaplains, psychiatrists and attorneys, and makes funeral arrangements when necessary.
“It can be depressing at times but I love the mix of my job. It can be emotionally charged but it’s never boring.”
Marianne Wershing, the shift charge nurse for the Special Care Nursery, campaigned to have Charania brought on full-time.
“She’s good talking with parents about any issues, even when it might be uncomfortable, like talking to someone with a history of drug use or telling parents they’re not visiting their babies enough. She’s very comfortable and never gets rattled. We deal with loss and it takes a very strong person to meet the emotional needs of someone when they’re losing a baby. I don’t know how she caught on as quickly as she did but I’m glad she’s here.” |
