Reporter
matthew.chin@guardian.co.tt
“I never wanted to be just one thing in my life. Never!” says Shenda Murray, who prides herself as a multipotentialite ever since she was a young girl.
She holds two degrees—in management and law. And although she did not enjoy doing management with an emphasis on accounting, it was the finance component of accounting she enjoyed the most.
Murray has worked in-house at five ministries, including the Trinidad and Tobago Securities Exchange Commission (TTSEC), and done training with the United States Securities Exchange Commission (USSEC).
She was also the tax manager at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and was the head of legal at the Ministry of Education before she went away to the Bahamas, where she worked as a senior consultant and then as a tax adviser in Montserrat.
At one point, however, Murray wanted to do hotel management and journalism but was told by her father that it would not make enough money to sustain her.
One field of study she refused to do was medicine, confessing that seeing people in pain or suffering bothered her as a compassionate person—a trait from her grandmother, whom Murray had known was empathic to the hardships of others while going against rigid gender norms at the same time.
“My story starts with my grandmother, more than with me. She never got the opportunity to be a girl at the time in the early twentieth century to do things further in education—they just didn’t give girls opportunities,” said Murray, whose grandmother was born in 1898.
“She used to go to Woodford Square and cook food, put it in parcels, and give it out. She never told anybody anything and never went to the papers about it. That’s my goal—to be like her—to have that compassion for people in my everyday interactions,” Murray said.
Murray’s grandmother instilled in her and her three siblings the importance of pursuing education and being fearless in advancing their dreams. Moreover, Murray’s father’s side of the family was also passionate about education. Her deep desire to hold many titles and continually grow her knowledge was supported by her parents, with her father being a major role model, showing her that it was okay to be more than one thing.
Her father, Garfield Murray, was an engineer before he became an architect. Later, he was the Chief Architect in the Ministry of Works and received a Public Service Achievement Award in 2012. “For my dad, education was number one. He expected you to do well, and even if you didn’t, you didn’t think that it was the end of the world.
He wanted us to be on a solid economic footing, whether or not you were married,” Murray said. “I was never interested in one field, because I was always exposed and encouraged to do whatever you wanted to do.”
For young people who are energised and fulfilled by learning new things, Murray strongly advises to have a plan and refuse any negativity from family or friends. “Unless they’re going to block you, then who cares? Make sure you can do what you want to do and give yourself a time frame. Think in big ways.”
Today, Murray is now transitioning out of the public sector to full-time legal and finance consultancy and, adding to her impressive repertoire, she intends to pursue a PhD in Politics or Anthropology, or “go off the grid” in Tobago.
“Maybe just giving everything up, doing things a little differently. At this stage in my life, I don’t need to do the pedantic things that I used to do. I can just do anything else I want to do at this point,” Murray said.
