My mother, Maureen, was born on February 8th, 1958 in Chicago Illinois. Her parents were Rose and Charlie. Rose was a nurse and she worked at the bank; Charlie was a police officer. Maureen has one brother, Morris, and five sisters: Genevieve, Valerie, Victoria, Antoinette, and Eileen. She was the second oldest of seven. They grew up in Edison Park, a small suburb outside of Chicago. She went to college at DePaul University and ultimately graduated in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in business management. She her first real job was at Pullman Bank.

Who inspired you the most growing up and how?

My Uncle Sal, definitely. He always seemed to be someone who did the right thing. He always knew what to do, how to act, and how to make good decisions. He always took the high road to make the right choices. He put family first before everything. He easily related to people and people respected him. He was a high-school principal in a Chicago suburb. I remember him being the dean first, and then he got moved up to be the principal. He inspired me the most because he made decisions based on what was right, not based on whether or not people would agree with him. He was a more of a personal influence, someone that I would observe and watch how he’d interact with others. Also, he was my sponsor my confirmation. I never really knew what exactly he had accomplished, but I knew he was always doing something productive. I knew that when I grew up, I would want to have the composure that Uncle Sal had.

Many of your family members didn’t go to college, what made you decide to go?

I don’t know, what made me go? My friends all were going, my best friend, Kathy was going. In high-school, there was six of us that all hung out, and they were all going to University of Illinois, but that wouldn’t work for me. I didn’t have enough money to go away for college, and I don’t think I would have like to go away for college. When I talked to my counselors, they said I should go into accounting because I had good scores in math. I remember thinking, what is that? What do they do? I didn’t know a woman who was an accountant, I didn’t know anyone that was an accountant, period. My mother was nurse, so I thought that would be a good career to go into. Loyola University had a good nursing program and it is was close, so I went there.

I went to Loyola for a year, and during the second semester, I was rethinking my choice to go into nursing. We had to cut open a cat, and I did not like that at all. If cutting open a cat was going to bother me that much, I had to really rethink what it meant to be a nurse. There is so much to know about being a nurse and helping sick people, I just didn’t think that was right for me. Then I changed schools and majors and I went into fashion design. I sewed very well, and people encouraged me to look into a fashion design program. But I found out that I wasn’t competitive enough to be in the fashion world, and my designs were too tailored and classic. I learned a lot of things, like how to make a pattern to sew things instead of just sewing things from a pattern. It was a nice thing to know, and I got an associates degree in fashion design, but other than a piece of paper, it wouldn’t help me much from a professional standpoint. But it did help me when I wanted to make my own wedding dress.
Maureen Schmidt, March 28, 1993

When and why did you start working a Pullman Bank?

When I decided that fashion was not a career I wanted to go into, I applied at the local bank. My mother worked there part-time and they had an opening for a teller, so I applied. The bank was close to home, and working in the bank environment was interesting to me. We had to wear a uniform though, but at least I didn’t have to pick out what to wear to work everyday. I need a wardrobe either, so I didn’t need to spend my money on work clothes because of the uniform.
At the time, I wasn’t in school anymore because I needed to take a break to figure out what I wanted to do. I applied to be a teller, but there was an opening in the accounting department, so I asked if I could do that instead. So I guess I never really was a teller. After I started, I was learning different things just from working there, but they also sent me to seminars to learn more about banking, and I discovered an interest in that. I went back to school for business management at DePaul University. It seemed to me that if you wanted to advance in your career, you needed a college degree. Whenever someone asked, “Well, where did you graduate,” it always made me uncomfortable to not have the answer. All of the men at the bank had their wedding ring on their left hand, and their college ring on their right. It was a clearly a big deal to have to the formal education that college provided and I decided I really wanted that.
How did you get into HR (human resources)?

I was doing accounting, but then a position came up and it was in human resources. It was part accounting and part human resources, and at the time, I knew nothing about human resources, but it was a promotion, so I asked to be considered. I remember being interviewed by the president of the bank for the position, and I was very excited when he offered the position to me. So then, I knew I had to do something to learn the HR piece of it, so I started taking any opportunity for a class or a seminar about HR. It was good from a networking perspective because I met so many people from those meetings. It was great to have other professionals that have business knowledge that I could draw on.

How would you describe a work day?

The promotion made it so I had to dress for the professional career environment everyday. I had to wear a suit, hose, and pumps. Always, always had hose. It had to be the whole look, it was not at all the casual environment. I even had an extra pair of hose in my desk drawer just in case I got a run in my stockings. I always had my nails done and the whole nine yards.

When I would get to work, I would always have a variety of projects that I was working on. Whether it was on the accounting side or HR side, there was always a variety. There was also deadlines throughout the week or month that you knew you had to meet, but I could adjust my day-to-day accordingly. I had a lot of independence to manage my work day. I had an assistant to handle the more routine things to enable me to continue with projects that had to be taken care of. It was a lot of fun, actually.

The majority of the management team were men, but there were two women on the team, including me. The whole industry was like that, more male dominated than women. The women were just getting started in the workplace, and most women didn’t have the necessary training. I don’t know if I officially recognized that when I was there, but I always had the support of my co-workers. I felt that the men respected me, but I had a unique area of responsibility, so it wasn’t like I was being compared to. I was just different. I got along with all of them, and I felt accepted.

What is something you most remember about working there?

It was interesting, the whole cash vault of money, and how much cash is needed to operate the bank. It’s not really money to you because it’s not your money, it’s the banks. I remember the smell of the money, the certain smell that money has when there’s so much in one spot. On a regular basis, there was audits that required all of the officers of the bank to count all of the money in the vault to confirm the balance. It was always surprising how long it took to count the money. There was also audits on the tellers to make sure that their cash balanced too. Chuckling, there were stories over the years about the tellers’ money not adding up, but those stories can’t be shared here. A teller could remember every transaction, and it was amazing how specific they were.

Why did you quit working at the bank?

I left the bank when it was sold to another bank. The banking industry was changing drastically, and banks were being sold constantly. The bank that had bought out my bank already had someone in charge of HR, so I no longer had a position as the HR director. That was in 1999, it was hard to believe that I was there for 19 years.


During the time Maureen was working at the bank, her family friend had introduced her to her husband, James Schmidt. They were married in March of 1993 and had their first child, Daniel, in 1994 while Maureen was still at the bank. She had her second child, Jaclyn, in 1996. She failed to mention these life changing events in the interview because she thought it was all about the her job at the bank. After she left the bank, she was hired almost immediately with Acxiom Corporation in 2000. She is still currently working there as their Human Resources Manager.