Becoming a Funeral Director was not my first career choice even though my family has been in the business for over 60 years. What started as a one-year sabbatical, turned into a complete career change and I decided to pursue my Funeral Director’s License.
Graduated May 2023
Becoming a Funeral Director was not my first career choice even though my family has been in the business for over 60 years. After high school, I wanted to make my own path, so I decided to pursue a career in mental health. For 10 years I worked as a Marriage and Family Therapist in a Community Mental Health Crisis Center with the most chronically underserved and at-risk population in San Antonio, Texas. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I made the decision to support my family as they fought to keep up with the staggering increase in demand placed on the death care industry. What started as a one-year sabbatical, turned into a complete career change and I decided to pursue my Funeral Director’s License in 2022.
I attempted to enroll with other funeral certificate programs but as waves of COVID continued to hit, I did not have the time to jump through all the hoops of the application and enrollment process. At the 2022 TFDA Convention in Galveston, I had a chance encounter with Mrs. Olga Scott and Mr. Manuel Osorio at their booth for Northeast Texas Community College. I had never heard of the program, but I knew Mr. Osorio from working with him in the funeral industry and I knew he would be a great professor. Mrs. Scott’s enthusiasm for the program was contagious and I knew this was the opportunity I needed. The application and enrollment process could not have gone any smoother. I applied online in late June, right after the conference, and got a response so fast that I was able to start classes in August, complete the certificate program in May and passed the board exam in June of 2023. It is hard to believe I went from applying for the program to provisionally licensed in less than a year.
