Andreia: I’m originally from the Northeast area of Brazil, known as the State of Bahia. I lived there my entire life until I moved to Houston in 2006 for marriage, love, and other family plans.

Andreia: It’ll be a year next month. I was laid off last year, in June, and I used to work for a company that also provided help. Whenever I lost that job I knew I wanted to stay in this sector and started searching for positions available in nonprofits, and that’s how I found myself here.

Andreia: As a Grants Accountant, our day-to-day is reviewing and submitting reimbursement requests for the funders. And then we also process a large number of other requests for other recipients.

Andreia: Well I have always like numbers and like that numbers can tell a story. You can figure out different issues and situations from the numbers. You can also learn about the story of the company and where it started to where it is now. Those type of things are really interesting to me. I received my Bachelors in Business Administration from a college in Brazil and am currently working on my Bachelors of Accounting from the University of Minnesota online; I have about a year and a half left for that one.

Andreia: Right now my main project is learning as much as I can about grants, I was just recently put into this role. Especially learning about the regulations, what is required so we can comply, and how we can decrease the amount of findings or errors we have.

Andreia: I really enjoy the reporting part of it. It’s funny to some people, also may be a little weird, but I love forms and filling them out correctly. Or even filtering out what is not correct on certain forms is fun to me.

Andreia: It has nothing to do with accounting! But I absolutely love fashion and sewing. I am currently starting my own brand of skirts called ‘Rosa Camara’ which is Portuguese and means Cool Rose in English. I have completed the project of starting an online store and am now working on the legal part with trademarks and everything else. I also want to eventually invest into finishing school and pursue a CMA (Certified Management Accountant) certification so I can mingle business and accounting.

Andreia: I’m a big Star Wars girl. So, I love Yoda. And I also love comics! Mostly Marvel and X-men. When I was a kid I used to collect comic books. My dad would take my sister and I to the booth in our neighborhood and we would buy Superman and X-men comics.