I’ve always been a bit of a split personality.

I grew up loving pictures, art, and cartoons. My parents had parts of the Time-Life World War II book series. I loved to dig through and find technical drawings of tanks and landing craft and imagine what it would have been like to be in one of those. I enjoyed thumbing through my grandfather’s collections of National Geographic and True West magazines to see the pictures and imagine being in those places.

But I also had a scientific/engineering side. Watching Carl Sagan explain the Cosmos with visuals and examples helped me to understand the natural world around me. Documentaries opened up the incredible world of history, nature, and science to me.

Then, in college, I took a course in Limnology (the study of fresh water lakes and rivers). Concepts were explained in diagrams that incorporated both art of the landscape, animals, insects, and plants with technical charts, graphs, and maps.

I saw that I could merge my split personality into a career. But it wasn’t immediately clear how.

I had jobs that either were just to pay the bills or never panned out into a dream career.

It wasn’t until later that I noticed a tendency of places I worked. Sooner or later I’d be put on a spreadsheet or database to manage data. And sooner or later I’d be making charts and graphs. The people I worked for/with saw something in me that led to that path.

When I finally saw in myself what others saw in me, I realized my focus should be on data analysis and data visualization. But what should my path be? I applied for and got into the Master’s program in Geographic Information Systems and GeoSpatial Science.

I earned a Ph.D. in GeoSpatial Science applied to human exposure assessment and epidemiology. (P.S. Don’t bother looking at my actual degree. It says “Forestry” because that was where the program was housed due to a history of working with the Forest Service, even though I’ve only had one tree identification class in my entire academic career.)

From that point on, I’ve been able to focus my career on developing my data wrangling skills, honing my analytical skills, and improving my data communication and visualization skills. I love being able to use all my interests in projects.

But my life is more than just data…

I love playing guitar at local music jams.

Hiking in the mountains keeps me grounded.