New YAM Director Left Engineering For Ministry

ERIKA ANDERSON, Staff Writer

Published: September 9, 2004

ATLANTA—For years, Ann Blasick was determined to impress the world.

She worked hard to succeed in a male-dominated profession, and though her drive was there, something was missing.

But for the past three years, serving as the program coordinator for young adult ministry for the archdiocese, Blasick, 29, finally feels she has found her niche and is doing the work that God wanted her to do all along. And with a new role as the director of young adult ministry, she hopes to continue her ministry with the same sense of purpose for which she searched much of her adolescent and young adult life.

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Blasick lived on a dirt road in the small town of Benton. The Polish-Italian parish of St. Martha was a close-knit, very small church, and the community played a big part in Blasick’s life.

“From our house, literally the only thing you could walk to was the church. We had a three-mile radius from our house that we would walk, and besides cows and a few random houses, there was the church,” she said.

The oldest of three children, Blasick began playing the organ at Mass and spent every Saturday afternoon practicing for Sunday.

“I was up there every Saturday, and that was how church became more than just a Sunday thing,” she said.

The doors of the church opened to cornfields and remained unlocked at all times. Even as a young girl, Blasick knew that the church was a place to feel safe and loved.

“They started adoration when I was in high school, and even though I really didn’t understand it, I was drawn to church, I was drawn to adoration,” she said. “For me it was just prayer time. I would just go and say ‘hi’ to God.”

But the small-town girl had big city dreams, and she set her goals high, attending Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and studying mechanical engineering. She had originally intended to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a math teacher, but he steered her in another direction.

“He was the one who encouraged me to try engineering,” she said. “It was almost all guys, and I liked being different. Because not a lot of women did it, I liked the challenge and I liked proving I could do it,” she said.

It was also her first time away from home and her first view of the world outside her little town. After completing an internship with NASA in Virginia Beach, where she realized “for the first time how big the world was, that it was more than just northeastern Pennsylvania,” Blasick decided to apply to graduate school.

“I looked into mechanical engineering programs, and I set my standards high. All I knew was that I wanted to be in a city. I decided that Atlanta sounded fun,” she said.

So after visiting and falling in love with the city, Blasick started graduate school at Georgia Tech. When her father drove her down and got her settled, he next dropped her off at the Tech Catholic Center for Sunday Mass, where she was immediately welcomed by the campus chaplain, Father Mario Di Lella, OFM.

“Father Mario made a big deal of welcoming me, and we got to talking about piano and he told me he didn’t have anyone to play for Mass, so I played that very night,” she said. “The Catholic Center was an important part of my time there.”

But more than anything, Blasick loved Atlanta.

“I was homesick, but at the same time I was so excited to be here. I could just stand there and look at the skyline for hours. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. To me, it was better than any mountain range or creek or anything like that,” she said. “I had all that at home.”

She left Tech, she said, with “every intention of being an engineer” and applied for many jobs.

“But I realized I wasn’t excited about any of them,” she said. “I’d see these offices with the cubicles, and I just dreaded it. These places were just so not alive.”

Eventually she landed a job with Lucent Technologies in New Jersey. Receiving a good salary and being in the middle of a cutting-edge project still did not satisfy Blasick.

“I was sad from my first day there to my last. It numbed me and sucked the life out of me,” she said. “And the churches weren’t really alive either. It was like there was a bunch of things missing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

She began looking for other jobs and was thrilled when an opportunity arose at another firm in Atlanta. She moved back in 1999 to work for Nortel and became involved with the singles group at the Cathedral of Christ the King, where she began to grow in her faith.

“This was the first time I had peers who really got it, who really prayed and had a relationship with Jesus,” she said. “My faith life really came alive for the first time.”

She threw herself into the CTK ministry, planning retreats and Bible studies, and found herself enjoying that more than her job.

“It became clearer and clearer that engineering was not where I was supposed to be,” she said. “I had been doing all these things to impress the world, but it wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”

After reading a want ad for young adult ministry (YAM) program coordinator, Blasick knew that God had a ministerial plan for her.

“While I was interviewing, I just had this great sense of peace,” she said. “Despite taking a pay cut and kind of giving up everything I’d studied in school, there was never a doubt that this was what I was supposed to be doing.”

She began her role as program coordinator on Aug. 20, 2001.

“The job has definitely allowed my faith to grow. That atmosphere that I loved so much at CTK surrounds me all day now, and I feel really lucky,” she said.

Former YAM director Kersti O’Farrell is now serving as the senior director for lay formation and adult ministry, and Blasick took over the YAM director role on July 1. She believes strongly in the program and says there is something for everyone.

“We have got something here that doesn’t exist literally anywhere else. Whether you are a party person or you are a devout Catholic, you can walk into a YAM event and meet other cool young adults and as a result, your faith will grow,” she said.

She’s quick to give praise to her successors and also to Archbishop John F. Donoghue, who, she said, has “done a great job of supporting us.”

As more young adults move into the area and find out about YAM, the program continues to grow. When Blasick first started her job, there were 1,800 young adults on the YAM e-mail list. There are now 3,700.

“We just have something special here,” she said.

And as for the small-town girl who made it into the big city, Blasick knows she’s in the right place.

“We all have different charisms and gifts from the Holy Spirit, and mine are definitely not engineering,” she said. “I feel like I’m really, for the first time, using my gifts the way I’m supposed to.”