Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, keeps it real when discussing how she built a career as one of the most innovative and influential social entrepreneurs around:
I was so lucky. The way I got to this was that I was in a desperate funk my senior year in college — when I realized somehow for the first time, in October, “I have to figure out what I’m going to do next year.” I just thought, “Well, I’ll apply for jobs.” But it hadn’t really clicked that I was actually going to have to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
And I was just uninspired. I just couldn’t find the thing that I really wanted to do. And that led me into a funk for the first time in my life.
And that’s what ultimately led me to this. Because I thought, “You know what I’d want to do?” Having never previously even contemplated teaching, I thought, “I’m going to go teach in New York City.” And I started exploring it and realized what a maze it was to try to teach in New York City.
That’s what led me to realize: You know what? We should recruit people to teach in low-income communities as aggressively as people were being recruited at the time to work on Wall Street.
I’m glad that I somehow landed on this thing that I became so passionate about. Because I’ve spent not one bit of energy for 20 years trying to figure out what I really want to be doing.
You just never know how one thing might lead you to another.
This is pretty glib, I must say. The assumption that you can just teach because you can’t figure out what else to do is one thing. The assumption that the municipality/state should make it easy fr you as an untrained, seemingly uncommitted teacher is entirely another. She sure did get lucky: capitalizing on the joke that has been made of the teaching profession. It’s just another entry-level job for the untrained, and therefore necessarily underpaid and under-respected.