milestones

Wow! What a crazy week. Our receptionist Serena is on vacation this week so I've been leading a double life: reception-desk junkie in the morning and just everything for the rest of the say. I've kind of been enjoying it though, despite the long hours, it's given me a new perspective of how the place runs. It's kind of cool to know everything that's going on; I enjoy it.

This morning I went and did the hair for a shoot with the fabulous Angela Y. Martin, who also did a shoot for us at the salon a few weeks ago. Check out her stuff, it's amazing: http://aymphotography.com/ Will put up some shots as soon as I get them!

So today's gonna be a lighter entry, and I'll follow this over the next couple days with some more fun technical stuff =)

I've hit a few personal milestones this week I'd like to share with you all! First off, this week marks four years in Canada for me, and even though I never came up here to do hair, I'm glad that I happened to be here when I wanted to get into it. Back home in Massachusetts, to get into the hair business before you can work in a salon you have to put in your school hours. It costs and arm and a leg but you need 1,000hours (I'm not 100% sure on this number, but it's around this) in the classroom before you can even start in a salon, and when you do, you start at the bottom as an assistant. This is how I assumed it was everywhere, cause I had no reason to think otherwise and it's pretty reasonable. So when I graduated from U of T last last May, I knew I wanted to get into hair but I thought it would be a few years before I could save up the money to get myself into school here in Toronto. I was desperately looking for a job because I was working at U of T at the time in a position only for students, so I couldn't stay there (nor did I really want to), and I was also having visa issues. Being an immigrant is really no fun, but luckily for me the law changed right when I needed to and I got my visa, so I started looking for jobs. I was planning on going into make-up school in the fall cause I could afford that and I thought it might be an asset, but I was looking for a salon to work at just as a receptionist or something like that so that I could get my foot in the door somewhere. So I went for an interview at a really high-end salon downtown and the owner interviewing me asked me if I was going for the assistant or the apprentice position. I told him the assistant cause I hadn't been to school yet and he said I didn't have to have! That changed everything. He explained the apprenticeship program here, which basically lets you learn in the salon (which means you're getting paid to learn instead of dropping $15,000 to) and you only have to do two short classes with the board of apprenticeship. So I started looking for jobs as an apprentice and that's how I found my spot at Greg May Hair Architects! I was so happy, a month out of school and I was already on my way to exactly the career I wanted. So thank you, Ontario!