Plymouth's own Charmayn Thigpen has recently joined the fast paced, competitive and dynamic world of real estate, becoming one of the dedicated brokers for the ENC Pirate Realty-Howard Hanna Allen Tate Real Estate firm.
After graduating from Plymouth High School in 2009, Thigpen went on to attend UNC Greensboro to study human development and fam- ily studies with a minor in psychology, largely due to her desire to help others through their struggles.
“I’ve always loved helping people and I loved the idea of being able to make a living doing it,” Thigpen recalls. “For me, I wanted to eventually deal mostly with adolescents because I felt like I had most of my struggles during that time. But overall, I really did want to do something with counseling and helping families.”
However, as with most of our best laid plans, Thigpens’ was subject to change greatly as she continued on her journey. After her stint at UNCG, her path would pivot into the world of dentistry, particularly the realm of pediatric dentistry.
“After I came back home, ended up going into dentistry,” she recalls. “One of my favorite jobs was working in the PEDs clinic at East Caroli- na University’s Dental School.”
As she tells it, delving into the world dentistry came after she reached a crossroads in her life. More importantly, that decision came after deciding that she wanted to set her self apart from the kind of careers that her family had traditionally chosen.
“Honestly, I knew that I wanted something fulfilling to do and I had a choice between going into the medical industry or dental,” she says. “I felt like everyone in my family either went into the military or they became a nurse or a medical assistant of some kind. I just wanted to do something different than they all did and dentistry provided that something for me.”
Thigpen would ulti- mately spend the next eight years in dentistry as an assistant, working well into the height of the COVID-19 global pandemic. For Thigpen, the troubled COVID-19 years were a time of great personal transition as she was...