In Her Shoes

With a name like Adventure Girl, you know she's rockin' a dream job. She's a daring traveling expert, and has left footprints in places like safaris in Africa and ice hotels in Iceland. She's not just your average travel guru — Stefanie Michaels, has been dubbed by Vanity Fair as "America's Tweetheart," for her huge Twitter following on @adventuregirl . . . about 1.5 million followers and growing.

SavvySugar: Tell me about your favorite day on the job.

Stefanie Michaels: The first time I saw a lion in the wild. That was really spiritual. For the four days we had been looking, because we heard that there was this pride of lions that had a series of babies over the past months and we couldn’t find them. All of a sudden, our tracker said something to the driver and we made a U-turn to a different direction and we came around these boulders to see the pride. There was one male and there had to have been maybe six females all different ages, and the babies. There had to have been about nine to 10 babies and they were all rolling around, playing, hissing and growling, and we just sat there still, quiet in the truck. We watched the babies play and the mothers lick them, and it was almost like we shouldn’t have been there but we got this view. I just pinched myself. I couldn’t believe that we were sitting there watching this. The driver turned around to us later and said did you understand how rare this is. It was magical it was one of the most incredible experiences that I've ever had.

SS: Where do you want to go to next?

SM: Antarctica is on my shortlist, I’ve been trying to get there for a long time there’s always some kind of roadblock. But I feel like I want to get there faster, because of what’s going on with global warming. It may not be there to see so I’d really like to get there.

For more about Stefanie's adventures, read on!

Who knew that entertaining and making guests feel welcome could become a job? That's exactly what Rosanna Bowles, a hostess extraordinaire, does for a living. To top it all off, she's also an author and has written a book called Coming Home. What makes her unique is that she weaves her international experience into her tableware designs, and at the same time, her pieces still manage to make one feel at home. From cutesy cupcake plate designs to British royalty-inspired mugs, there's no end to her creativity!

SavvySugar: How did you get into this?

Rosanna Bowles: I got into this profession initially because of my education. My bachelor's is in liberal arts and master's is in Italian. I wanted to be able to use my education and my love of the arts and foreign language. I studied in Italy my junior year near a town that produces beautiful handmade ceramics. I wanted to use my education and be able to incorporate everything that I am passionate about into a company. That is how Rosanna Inc. got started.

SS: What other dream jobs did you have?

RB: If I wasn't doing what I am doing, I would want to be a professor of a foreign language. I have taught Italian at University of Oregon (go Ducks!) and would love to do it again someday.

To find out more about Rosanna's life, read on.

If you haven't caught up to what I've been up to this month, read about how to start your own volunteering initiative at work, and ideas you can implement at the office. This week, I'll be featuring two of my favorite charities to celebrate the spirit of Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, I talked about Kiva, and today Room to Read CEO and co-founder, Erin Ganju, will share her story on how her nonprofit is making a difference, one book at a time. The organization sees the education of children as a key factor to escaping poverty, and their team works towards that vision by setting up libraries, schools, and more in countries all over the world.

SavvySugar: What was your favorite book when you were a kid?

Erin Ganju: I had a ton of favorite books that were my favorite.  But one of them is certainly Dr. Seuss, who I think is really attractive to young children with all of the great rhymes and fun characters. Green Eggs and Ham in particular was one of my favorites, which is representative of the kind of an icon of an amazing children’s book that everyone refers to. In many ways, Room to Read sees itself as being able to create similar stories. We often say we want to be the Dr. Seuss of the developing world. Because it’s just that idea of making reading fun, exciting, to draw a child in, and make it about reading for enjoyment. That’s what I think is the classic Dr. Seuss experience kids should have.

SS: Who is your female role model?

EG: I always say that my best role model has been my mom. She definitely was a trailblazer in her own time. She was one of the first thousand members of the Peace Corp volunteers in the early sixties under Kennedy, and prior to that in the late fifties, she taught English in Japan, so she really was very internationally minded at a young age and in a time when it was very unusual in the US. So I kind of gained a lot of my love for the world around me and being a global trail blazer from my mom. I also look up to strong women like Madeline Albright who broke through many glass ceilings in her own time as the first Secretary of State. She really set a different tone for the fact that women can be a part of the conversation at the leadership level in the world. When you look at the 190 countries in the world, only 15 of them have heads of states that are women, the last time I checked. Eleven of them are in the developing world. So in many ways, I always tell Room to Read investors that it’s probably more likely that some of the girls in our girls education program in developing countries may grow up to be presidents of their own countries than it probably is for our own daughters.

To hear more about her vision for Room to Read's future, read on!

If you haven't caught up to what I've been up to this month, read about how to start your own volunteering initiative at work, and ideas you can implement at the office. This week, I'll be featuring two of my favorite charities to celebrate the spirit of Thanksgiving.

Micro . . . what?! Sure, the term microfinance may sound complicated, but their message is simple: giving loans to budding entrepreneurs in another part of the world who need a little leg up to get out of poverty. If you're familiar with the microfinance world, the name Kiva will often pop up, and if you were watching Oprah last Friday, you'd know it was one of her favorite things. Kiva is a nonprofit that provides an Internet platform for lenders to connect with microfinance institutions around the globe. But don't worry, you don't need match up to an Oprah Winfrey-like donation — even a $25 loan can make a difference. I talked to Kiva's CEO Matt Flannery, who told me more about the feel good nonprofit.

SavvySugar: Why do you think Kiva resonates with people?

Matt Flannery: I think people are naturally generous. It’s tough to figure out how to express our generosity. It’s tough to reach out and connect with another person. And charity is not that easy sometimes. It can seem like you don’t know where your money is going or it’s a big black hole. With Kiva, we allow you to express that natural generosity in a very personal way, which people connect with, because you get to see the other person in the opposite end of the loan, and that really helps people feel comfortable and motivated.

SS: Oprah featured Kiva as one of her favorite things for 2010. How did that affect your company?

MF: Well it’s always an incredible effect — it’s like just pouring kerosene over fire for Kiva. It happened three years ago, and I was just elated when I found out it was going to happen again because it’s great for our cause, and it’s great for Kiva, and we’re really thankful that Oprah supports stuff like this. What happens on a near-term basis is our traffic probably spikes up ten times. It’s ten times greater than any other day, and this was a particularly funny situation because we were partnering with Groupon to have our first ever Kiva Groupon.

To hear more about the female entrepreneurs Kiva helps, read on!

While other preteens were exchanging Pokemon cards, Emerson Spartz started MuggleNet.com at the mere age of 12 in 1999. He wasn't just a kid fooling around on the Internet — the website grew to be the go-to Harry Potter fansite, which at its peak drew in nine million monthly visitors. Now he's 23, and already a veteran in the field of new media with seven websites under his belt . . . and counting. Read all about his magical journey in this latest installment of my dream job series: In His or Her Shoes.

SavvySugar: How did this all start?

Emerson Spartz: My story starts back in 1999 about one month after I started homeschooling. I suddenly found myself with more free time than I knew what to do with. So I found one of those free webpage makers, and I started playing around with it. Then I decided to make a Harry Potter website because I just read the third book, and I was totally obsessed. So in the beginning, it was really just messing around with the different features of the webpage editor, but I very quickly decided that I wanted to build the biggest and best Harry Potter website on the Internet and I started putting in a lot of hours producing it. So that's where it started and I built MuggleNet over the years — the number one most visited Harry Potter website. At its peak it was doing about nine million unique monthly visitors, and it was one of the top one thousand websites on the Internet.

To read all about how Emerson met J.K. Rowling and what it's like to work with the love of his life, read on!

Christin Evans takes the cake this week for the ultimate dream job, because The Booksmith owner is doing her community a great service by matching up book lovers with great finds. In addition to that, she's also breathing life into the floundering breed of independent bookstores, which are being overwhelmed by Borders, eBooks, and sites like Amazon. Christin and her husband, Praveen Madan, bought the San Francisco-based bookstore three years ago, and have never looked back to their previous corporate and business suit-filled lives.

SavvySugar: How did you get into this?

Christin Evans: I was actually a management consultant for many years and helped big companies get bigger. After I had done that very successfully for many years, I kind of got to the point where I said am I having an impact or am I just helping Microsoft get bigger or helping Bill Gates get richer? So I took some time off, and spent a year thinking about a lot of different business ideas. Then I stumbled on the idea that independent bookstores really haven't been recreated for the 21st century. Most independent bookstores were started 20, 30, 40 years ago by book lovers who really nurtured their stores during the hay day of paper and hardcover books. But then with the arrival of chain stores, then Amazon, now eBooks, there continues to be lots of pressures on independent bookstores. Over a decade ago, there were more than 5,000 bookstores in the U.S. and now there are fewer than 1,200, as measured by the American Booksellers Association membership. The way I came into this job is because I found it an intellectual challenge, I was always a reader, but I also saw it as an opportunity to try to create an independent bookstore that would be able to sustain . . . thrive in a technology era.

To read more about Christin's wonderfully bookish life, read on!

If you think long and hard about the people who made lasting influences in your life, I'm sure several teachers will pop up. It's funny how no matter how many years go by, I still remember the one or two encouraging statements from teachers that have changed the course of my life. Dan Brown, a high school teacher in Washington DC and author, is empowering lives every day, one student at a time.

SavvySugar: How did you get into this?

Dan Brown: Well, I first became a teacher straight out of college in 2003. I got into it sort of by accident, I was in film school at NYU. I wasn't studying to be a teacher. As I was nearing graduation, it became clear that if I wanted to stay in New York City and pay the rent, I needed to get a real job. At least for the next few years. So I joined a program called the New York City Teaching Fellows, which is like Teach For America where it takes people who don’t have a background in education and gives them a provisional certification. It basically throws them into the toughest schools where there are shortages of qualified teachers. So this appealed to me because my mom was a teacher, and I was always interested to work with kids. This was also about a year and a half after 9/11 so I was feeling very interested in doing something for New York. So I signed up, and it was the toughest year of my life, but also opened my eyes to how rewarding and thrilling being a teacher is.

To hear more about why teaching is rewarding, read on.

I don't think I've ever met one person who has never read (and didn't love) Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We definitely love candy over here, which is why we're really excited to introduce Dylan Lauren, the female version of a real-life Willy Wonka and the owner of Dylan's Candy Bar, for this week's In Her Shoes series!

SavvySugar: Tell me why this is your dream job?

Dylan Lauren: I love the fact that I can taste some candy all day and eat candy. It’s just a lot of fun. I go to all the state shows . . . and  I get to design and use my art and fashion background [because] we have a lot of nonedible products. We sell handbags, pajamas, accessories and t-shirts that all have candy themes and so I designed those. I also work on packaging and labels and all that stuff as well. It’s great!

SS: What's your favorite candy?

DL: I like a lot of things, right now I say candy corn and marshmallow fluff. I eat a lot of sugar, two handfuls of candy a day.

To find out what a candy queen's typical day is like, read on!

All of us have a dream job we're secretly harboring. Readers recently shared their dream jobs, which inspired this Savvy series: In Her Shoes.

Many of us have soft spots for animals, but Dr. Patty Khuly actually turned that love into a profession. She's a superhero for animals — a veterinarian in Miami by day, and pet health blogger at Fully Vetted by night. Patty received her veterinary and business degree at University of Pennsylvania.

SavvySugar: Why is your job a dream job?

Patty Khuly: I love the immediacy of being able to fix certain conditions. The dog that showed up today, who had started seizuring severely from biting a toad, you know, I can fix that. I mean, it’s going to take all night, but I can fix it. That dog will live and he won’t live unless I do something about it and I know how to do that and that kind of pleasure is really difficult to match and it’s very immediate. Then there’s the other kind of pleasure — a general satisfaction that your work for animals in your community actually makes a difference, not only to help the wider health of animals in your community, but it also makes people happy.

Patty almost became a professional chef! Read on to find out more.

All of us have a dream job we're secretly harboring. Readers recently shared their dream jobs, which inspired this new Savvy series: In Her Shoes.

Cupcakes are little treats that bring so much joy to the world and stomach, so it must be a dream to be surrounded by them all the time. That's exactly what Kara Lind of Kara's Cupcakes, deals with every day — cupcakes, cupcakes, and more cupcakes!

SavvySugar: Why is your job a dream job?

Kara Lind: It’s a dream job for a variety of reasons. One, it’s a dream job to be your own boss and see what you're creating and building. And two, it’s a dream job in a sense that you get to be creative and figure out what you want the outlet, the cupcakes, to look like. The flavor, the plan, the whole sense of style value — so that for me is a dream job. It’s just a creative outlet. And also a third part of the dream job is to create jobs for the people. It’s been really great to have these employees. We now have 70 employees and you just watch them flourish, and I watch our employees kind of come in to learn the ropes and really grow as people. That’s a dream to see come true to see that you’re helping other people kind of make their way.

SS: How many cupcakes do you eat per day?

KL: I prob eat one a day but I eat a mini, I don’t eat a full one. Let me put it this way, this morning when I went in, I didn’t have breakfast so I had two unfrosted warm pumpkin cupcakes and they were divine.

To hear how Kara went from Conde Nast to cupcakes, read on!