AAFCS turns the spotlight on individuals, their experiences, and how they have benefited from AAFCS membership and/or family and consumer sciences programs. It offers an opportunity for you to share your story with your colleagues and the greater FCS community, inspire future FCS professionals, and strengthen awareness of the profession and association.
Isn't it your turn to grab the spotlight? Download a submission form here!
Melanie Sandoval
East Hartford, Connecticut
Student Member since 2011
Melanie Sandoval, 24, resides in Connecticut with her husband. She enjoys reverse engineering recipes, running, making things, blogging, teaching workshops at her church, and biking. She is a 4-H volunteer, relationship educator, and MBA student.
Why did you choose the field of family and consumer sciences?
I grew up immersed in family and consumer sciences because my mom was a home economics teacher who took some time off to raise us while my siblings and I were little. She has since gone back to teaching FACS to middle schoolers. Naturally, since I had a very good teacher, I excelled in the various areas of family and consumer sciences. I won many sewing competitions in 4-H and enjoyed cooking and event planning. When it was time to make the decision to go to college, I was torn between majoring in biology and becoming a family and consumer sciences teacher. I decided to get my degree in FACS as I was already good at it and I knew there were a lot of job openings in my home state. I quickly become the president of Liberty University’s Family and Consumer Sciences Association and ran “dinner and a movie” cooking classes for students on campus about once a month. I excelled in the program and won numerous awards both from the department and in student teaching. When I returned to Connecticut I applied for several positions but found a culinary position that I took because I liked the wonderful ladies in my department. I taught for 3 ½ years and learned a lot, enjoyed the students, and was able to completely redo the entire existing culinary program as well as add three new courses to the curriculum.
Please share a few of your most recent accomplishments.
Through my experience of running a kitchen and a program to help fund the school’s culinary program, I realized that there was another subject that interested me immensely—business! I so enjoyed figuring out the accounting, marketing, customer service, and making business decisions through running the school’s culinary program. The state of Connecticut requires their teachers to begin a master’s degree program within the first three years of teaching so I pondered everything including an advanced degree in FACS. Unfortunately, there were no advanced FACS degrees from the local universities and I didn’t want an online education so I decided to pursue the next best thing—business, because it fascinated me. I enrolled in Uconn’s MBA program where I am a little more than half way through the program. In the process, I changed careers to free up my time and help me pay for my degree. I still enjoy the FACS subject area and always will for the rest of my life so I found an outlet to continue adding to the FACS body of knowledge even while pursing a different day job.
In 2008, I decided to start www.FamilyConsumerSciences.com . The idea for the site came after I finished student teaching and realized how much I wanted to help other new and experienced Family Consumer Science teachers by categorizing and sharing lessons, ideas, strategies, etc. At the very beginning of my student teaching experience I remember feeling so overwhelmed because I had to teach areas of FACS that were my weakest. I was so relieved when I stumbled upon the Utah Education Network’s website that published many different lesson plans with the supporting materials that I was inspired to create a resource that was similar but allowed for more community interaction and contribution.
I believe that teachers spend too much time trying to reinvent things that have already been done but are not available to them. We struggle alone often times not realizing that people that are more experienced have already done what we have been struggling with and have real answers. That is why I desire to categorize and freely share lessons and supporting materials so that teachers across the country can spend more time perfecting and tailoring lessons than having to create ones that already exist. I also like to keep up with trends in our industry and encourage more experienced teachers to keep making their lessons fresh, relevant, and current.
Want to Connect? Contact Melanie at m.sandoval@familyconsumersciences.com.
Read past spotlights: