Growing up as a child on the Northwest Side of Detroit, Michigan, I was fascinated with the weather. I wondered, "Why is the sky blue?" and "Why does it rain?" My parents bought me The Golden Guide to Weather, the only book that I ever read voluntarily from cover to cover as a child. I quickly realized that I wanted to become a meteorologist when I grew up and dreamed of attending the University of Michigan to do so. After fulfilling my pre-requisite coursework at the University of Michigan's Dearborn campus, I entered the Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences program at the University's main campus in Ann Arbor.

Upon completion of my B.S. from there, I realized that I had more questions about how the Earth's climate worked. So, I applied to graduate school and was accepted by the Atmospheric Sciences program here at The University of Arizona. After completing my M.S., I wanted to continue working in research, so that I could continue investigating how the ocean, atmosphere, and land interact with each other to form the Earth's climate system. Thus, I went on to work as a Research Specialist for my advisor, Prof. Xubin Zeng, investigating various aspects of ocean-atmosphere-land interactions and how they are represented in global climate models.

After 10 years as a M.S.-level researcher, I decided to finally work on my Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences, minoring in Global Change. Once completed, I want to continue doing research in ocean-atmosphere-land interactions, atmospheric science, and climate. I still own that by-now rather beat-up Golden Guide to Weather and continue to stand in awe of the weather and how seemingly stable the Earth's climate is. But as the climate changes around us, my Global Change coursework has opened up a new set of questions as to how climate has changed in the past, how it's changing now with our perturbations to it, and how it will impact humanity. I want to share what I know and learn not just to my fellow colleagues, atmospheric scientists and other geophysicists, but also to the general public, to people like my family still back in Detroit. I've had a little bit of training in this already in teaching a couple of undergraduate courses for my department, one being an undergraduate general education class. Maybe one day I'll inspire another little child somewhere who is questioning "Why is the sky blue?" or "Why does it rain?" to follow those questions to becoming a climate scientist.