Yay! You found the most important link on our website. The all about Melissa page. Hmm, I was due to be born on October 16th 1977 but that was a Sunday and the doctors all agreed that they didn’t want to work on Sunday if they didn’t have to so they told my parents (Gail and Jerry) to come back the next day. My dad said he couldn’t come back because he had a birthday party to go to (my brother’s fourth birthday) so they would come back on Tuesday. Thus I was born in Livingston NJ on Tuesday, October 18th. My first two years were spent down the shore creating a everlasting love of water. Nothing too exciting happened during the next 14 years. My parents, brother, and I lived in NJ my entire childhood. I was involved in many activities (dance lessons, violin, flute, sax, color guard) all of which my parents had a larger role in than me.

In order to escape NJ, I went oh so far away to the University of Rochester in NY. I took part in the school’s “Take Five” program to stay an extra year tuition free to study whatever I wanted. I left the university with a dual major in Biology and American Sign Language and spent my fifth year studying religion and philosophy. After graduation I had no goals or ambitions so I did what most grads do and I traveled abroad. Not wanting to be generic and backpack through Europe, I picked the Middle East. I spent three months traveling through Israel and Egypt arriving home to Florida (where my parents now lived) to work as a teacher in a private school for three months. Realizing that living with my parents was not the best idea, nor was teaching, I moved to Las Vegas to live for the next 20 months. What did I do there? I worked at a bookstore and sold coffee. Exciting, huh? While there I had my epiphany and realized that I could handle becoming a social worker. This lead me to gallaudet university.. and as they say… the rest is history.

.