My Life Story

When I was six years old my mother, big sister Megan, and I moved west from Boston to join my father in a one-streetlight town called Socorro New Mexico. My father had recently accepted a professor position with New Mexico Tech, an institution whose superior hydrology program matched the challenges and opportunities he had come to expect after teaching at MIT. It was a great place to be a professor. Socorro’s relaxed atmosphere and small town setting allowed him to walk to work in his cowboy boots. Being a kid in Socorro was a different story.

Or perhaps I was a different story. With a strong creative mother and a brilliant scientist father, I knew I would work hard and accomplish great things. My parents expected it of me, and I expected it of myself. What great things? I had no idea. But my mother’s leadership during my formative elementary school years was soon to help me find out.

Moving across the country and switching schools midway through the year was tough, so my mother tried to ease the change by enrolling us in a small catholic school with a strong enrichment program, where I was one of six girls in Sister Rosemary’s kindergarten class. Looking back, I picture my kindergarten teacher as a heroine in my ten-year-old nephew’s favorite video game, Smack Down vs. Raw: “…and weighing in at 110 pounds in the blue corner, give it up for the elderly Sister Rosemary (crowd roar)!” This fiery nun’s signature move was to topple naughty kids’ chairs when they least expected it so that they’d fall backwards and bop their heads on the floor. Luckily, I was never that naughty.

My mother soon caught wind of the kindergarten smackdowns and marched into the principal’s office armed with a smile and her southern charm, demanding that Sister Rosemary’s behavior be corrected. It was an abrupt ending to the sister’s fifteen-year undefeated record. She never toppled a chair again.

That was my mother’s way. She fought for what she believed in and usually made friends along the way. She taught her daughters the importance of independent thinking, and the power of standing strong for our convictions.

My mother told us that she gained her confidence while attending an all girls’ high school and college. While other girls of her generation were learning their place in male-dominated classrooms, she excelled in school, especially in the arts.

At her first job after college my mother was shocked to discover that she was not a valued or equally paid contributor. She raised the gender inequality issues to the management team while the other women in the office kept their heads down and tried to stay out of trouble. The tension came to a climax when her manager sat her down in his office, stared out the window and said, “A women’s place is in the kitchen scrubbing the floors.” One year later my mother won a major gender discrimination lawsuit requiring equal pay. Now the manager of a successful art gallery, my mother is a strong, creative person. Her example has inspired me on my own life’s journey, to follow my passions and to become the driven, successful professional that I am today.

My drive started early on when I decided I needed to look beyond my small town for a great education. Hard work, good grades, and National Science Olympiad standings led to a scholarship at a Colorado Springs college preparatory boarding school. With my parents’ support, I packed my bags, said goodbye to my bewildered friends and teachers, and headed to the dorms.

At Fountain Valley School I received what I consider to be the best education of my life. It allowed me to pursue my passions in art and science, earning awards in the visual arts while tackling advanced placement physics, thereby pleasing both the artist and the scientist in my family. I also participated in several sports including Outdoor Education, the most intense “sport” offered by my school. I scaled fourteeners, rappelled down waterfalls, ice climbed, earned a Wilderness First Responder certificate, and most importantly, pushed myself beyond all perceived mental and physical boundaries-a skill and a privilege that I try to remember off the mountain, today.

Following high school I attended the University of California at San Diego. Good friends exposed me to my major in Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts, which led to a career in digital media. I was an undeclared major on the science and engineering track when I partnered up with my second year roommate, Hilary Lasken. She was an art major who constantly needed subjects for her film and photography projects. One weekend I was a futuristic supergirl saving the world from evil; the next, I was squeezed into a front load washing machine to make a feminist statement about domestic chores. Pretty soon I found myself spending more time on Hilary’s assignments than my own. I signed up for an Intro to New Media course, created my first website, and I was hooked.

Ten years later and still crazy about digital media, I realize it’s the perfect intersection between art and science. Armed with my mother’s tenacity and artistic sense, and my father’s analytical mind, I feel like I can tackle anything. As a wise cheerleader once said “Bring it on, bring it on!”