Hello world! I am Olivia Seiler, but I go by Ollie. This is my first semester in the College of Business Administration where I am studying Accounting and also pursuing a minor in French. A little fun fact about me is that I think I may take the cake for being Bubly’s biggest fan. If you do not know what Bubly is, it is flavored sparkling water. The best way I have heard it be described is if someone blew on a lime next to a glass of sparkling water (the flavor is very faint).

Together, we are going to take a journey to appreciating Appalachia through the ACRI with the Fayette County Cultural Trust. Through this program, we will be learning more about Fayette County and building a relationship with the community there to help build upon the some of their assets to drive stable economic growth and opportunity.

To help you understand a little about why I chose to participle in this project, let’s go back in time to this past summer.

Do you ever go about your day and take a step back to reflect? I know, personally, it is a task that the everyday bustle of life does not really allow for, but this summer, I was doing just that during a lull in customers at the bank. I took a moment to feel in the rhythm of my environment, and in this moment, I remember thinking about the power of community.

To paint the picture for you, my manager was a strong woman who frequently went above and beyond to bring people into the bank and when she got them there, she provided wonderful service. A few things about her that stood out to me: her incredible listening skills, her thoroughness, her drive to include. She often made community engagement her passion project by planning events and organizing tabling efforts at community days. She made an effort to reach out to our partners to strength our connections to them. I sat at my teller window, where I was traditionally unsure of my future in business and my role in my environment, and I started to connect the dots that the one thing that really motivates me and inspires me is the unity of the people around me. Seeing first-hand how different members of my community, whether it be small business owners, grandparents, school board members, etc., would show up for each other every day and provide their services and advice to one another illustrated how community is still very much alive despite the division of the modern-day world.

So, when I learned about the Appalachia teaching project, I knew that I was going to make it a priority in my schedule. It is an opportunity to build a stronger community throughout Pennsylvania, and a chance to help support small business owners and young people, just like me not too long ago, that may be overwhelmed by the realm of possibilities that they do not even know are available to them. Additionally, going into my first year of college I was an Environmental Science major. After taking the time to reflect on what I wanted my future to look like, I decided my path actually looked a little different than what I previously thought, which brought me to the College of Business Administration. To be honest, I was unsure of the options available to me to study, and it all seemed so overwhelming. I am very appreciative of my time being a bit lost, because it helped me learn about a lot of Environmental issues that particularly affect regions like Appalachia and northern Pennsylvania, such as the repercussions of abandoned oil wells. Having this general background made ACRI stand out to me. I look forward to hearing first-hand perspectives of citizens of Fayette County. Being from Pittsburgh, I know a lot about hometown pride, so I am excited to hear what aspects of their community they feel the most prideful of and how I can help to highlight those things to others.

I hope that through this project that we can create sustainable benefits for the community through strengthening the University of Pittsburgh’s connection to Fayette County and to be one step closer to bridging the urban/ rural divide. Additionally, I look forward to having a real-world application of skills I learn through lecture courses. For example, in my Managing Complex Environments course, it is easy to give advice to business owners when it is in a fictional or sterile classroom environment, but through this project, the application of nuance is very necessary as these are real people with real livelihoods. An area of focus I hope we dive deeper into, during the course of the semester, is working with high school students to help let them know the resources available to them that I wish someone had helped me out with earlier, such as building a credit score and financing higher education.

With this project, I think it will help me continue to develop important skills that will carry me through my career, academic, and personal life. From an accounting perspective, looking deeper into your work and practicing a level of skepticism is very important. It is a career build on trust and transparency. In this role, I think it will play on these skills and traits in a self-checking way. I will come back to many of the questions accountants go back to in order dive deeper. Although, this time, I will be questioning my ideas, and my implementation of concepts community members would like to see to make sure I am implementing ideas in a positive and sustainable way. Similarly to that, it will help me build upon my communication skills. This role requires the ability to build genuine connections with others. Working alongside the Pitt faulty each week and Michael Edwards and Dan Cocks at the FCCT this semester, I think I am in the perfect place to learn from wonderful models of these skills.

So, I hope you will join me through my journey of appreciating Appalachia and follow along to see what the semester has in store!