NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/tag/mariola-galavis)
For this week’s Q&A with a local business owner, we hear from town resident Mariola Galavis of School of Rock New Canaan. The Grove Street business is open. Here’s our exchange. New Canaanite: Tell us what this experience of the pandemic, and health-related restrictions, has been like for School of Rock New Canaan? Mariola Galavis: We have been very lucky that we were able to stay open through the “stay-at-home” period.
Mariola Galavis couldn’t put her finger on just what was making her unhappy in the summer of 2011. The Venezuela native—one decade in the United States at that point, including seven here in New Canaan—wasn’t necessarily depressed, yet panic attacks inexplicably had set in, just as a determinedly pursued, successful career in management consulting landed her in a job that offered security without purpose. “I felt like I was wasting my life, sitting there in an office, going to meetings all day, because it was just meetings and meetings and meetings,” Galavis on Monday morning recalled of a position she’d held for six years in Westchester, sitting now on a well-worn sofa down the hall from her dramatically different office here in town. “Then I said, ‘I don’t need it.’ ”
With support from her husband and parents, Galavis consulted a professional therapist (“I took charge immediately because I was like, ‘What the hell is going on with me?’ ”), quit her job to stay home with her two boys and, for the first time in her life, pursued a creative endeavor that still suited her mathematical mind. Last week, Galavis—an MBA from MIT under her belt and several years consulting with Andersen for manufacturing, utilities and oil companies in Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Miami—took over the day-to-day operations as the new owner of School of Rock New Canaan.