You know that birthday-morning feeling when you know you’re special and you know that soon you’re going to get presents and eat cake? All of that sugar and love and maybe champagne to look forward to, and not yet any of the stickiness or disappointment or guilt? That’s how I feel in this magical window between signing a contract for an absolutely kick-ass new job and actually starting the work. It’s a full-time gig, and it’s going to knock our household schedule for a loop. I haven’t worked in an office in more than a decade, and my office self-image of the hot young thing is about to get a brutal reckoning. This job will make me more sedentary, and more stressed; I worry that this might make me less outwardly loving to my kids, less healthy, less resilient. It could be awful, and it could be absolutely fantastic.

Starting Tuesday, I’m going to work for the United Nations. I’m going to work for the section that takes great ideas and makes them a reality: the Innovation Accelerator. Cutting-edge at the U.N., can you believe it?! The Accelerator is part of the World Food Programme, and I am so excited to meet my colleagues I could go vegan*.

Betsy Rosenbaum

Head of Business Operations

United Nationas World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator

*this isn’t really an expression, but it feels to me like my new comrades might have some really exciting ideas about how best to impact the world’s future and I am here for them! (My family’s sustainably, humanely raised pork being the obvious exception, along with game that someone I know shot. And bugs I inhale during bike rides, I guess?)