 You know, I really am naturally an engineer. It just fits me. Engineering is a great beginning, but you get to create the story on where it takes you. There was always learning going on in my house. The question at the dinner table from my father was what did you learn at school today? And it was always better to have an answer than not because otherwise it sounded like a wasted day. My father and I had a discussion that lasted years over how many glaciers came through Indiana. Because of course you couldn't just go Google it. You had to go find a book, and then the other person would have to go find a book, and then you'd find another book. And so that kind of inquisitiveness was just a natural part of things. I was very lucky to grow up with a mother who had been a math major, a math and music major, but then she switched to English because they told her she wouldn't get a job with math and music as a teacher. So I grew up diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs while she was cooking. That was a game. I didn't know any different. I grew up in this little town, went to the same school my whole life until I graduated. You come from that and then stepping away from it, you come to Purdue. The nice thing is none of those, you know, maybe, you know, okay, there was a couple kids here who went to the same high school. There were some, but you come now to a brand new start. The labels you've had for the past umpteen years are gone. You get to be whatever you want to be. My father was an electrical engineer from Purdue, but really a jack-of-all-trades engineer, and my oldest brother was an electrical engineer from Purdue. I didn't really know what branch of engineering I wanted to go into, so it made sense to try something I'd been at least peripherally around. I was very lucky because the advisor I had for freshman engineering didn't try to keep me from exploring. There was a class in athletic training in the men's PE department, so it's like, well, maybe I can take courses that way, too. And my advisor didn't tell me I was crazy. Once I did electrical for a while, I was like, oh, that's not it. And I actually started another program. I mean, I designed the whole thing. When I jump in, I jump in with both feet. So it was going to be civil engineering and land surveying, because that's something else I'd done with my father. At the same time, I was starting the athletic training class. So there was overlap, and but that was where it quickly was like, oh, this is what this is what I need to be figuring out how to bring together with the engineering. The fun thing with engineering is if you can dream it, you can put engineering with it. So all you have to really decide is am I committed to engineering? Am I willing to do the work? Because there is some work. In my second year, I became a student trainer, because that was the first year they hired a woman athletic trainer. And that was to support women's sports that were just starting to mature because of Title IX. The trainer was gone with the volleyball team on the road. So I was taking care of the women's basketball team. One of the women came down with a rebound, torqued her knee, tore a ligament. I could examine it. I knew what was wrong. Pack it nice. The rule was, the trainer's not there. You go to the health center. The doctor who saw her didn't really do much examining her, didn't seem to know a lot, didn't say what ligament it was, but just basically said, go home and put a heating pad on it. And I'm like, he's the doctor. I'm the student trainer, so I can't say anything. I don't like that. And that was one of the first times I go, okay, if I want to do anything in medicine, I want to have equal say. I don't want to be in the second row, because somebody doesn't think I'm their equal. I went to medical school to a school where I was a second lieutenant for the four years of medical school, receiving the salary of a second lieutenant. If I'd been in the Navy and ensign, all the tuition's paid, books, supplies, stethoscope, black bag, the whole bit. In return, you owe seven years of service. So I owed 11, and my postgraduate training didn't pay off any. So I essentially obligated myself to an Army career. In the field I ended up choosing a nuclear medicine. I'm basically a consultant to other doctors. We do tests and some treatments on patients, and you help them sort out, okay, is this the best test at the best time to answer the right question? So there's a lot of logic to it. So that engineering background of being able to sort through the story problem came into play all the time. I had a friend who was a nurse practitioner and attorney. She's like, you know, you'd really enjoy law school. It's really a lot of fun because of the mental stimulation of it, and it's just, again, another language skill. And so I spent three years going to law school, which goes by really fast. And I was very lucky because a project I was doing my last semester of law school, I stumbled into this advertisement. It was just a little box on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's homepage. And it was talking about they were looking for people to be technical administrative judges. I'm like, I've never even heard of that. What in the world is it? And so I looked at it as like, huh, technical expertise, but you apply it to adjudications dealing with nuclear materials licenses. Engineer nuclear medicine with a little legal thrown in. It seemed like a pretty good fit. It's okay to be a bit lost, but it's the fun of the exploration that's the adventure. You get to try out different things, whether it's personally, academically. You may co-op, try different work. You may take volunteer jobs. I encourage people, if you think you know what you want to do, try and get as close as you can to doing it. Most, there's a lot of people who let you shadow them, even if you can't get a full job doing it, or volunteer, but a lot of those volunteer things can turn into real work. But you know, try and see what it's really like. Take a class, talk to professors. Most of them really like talking to students. That's why they're here. And so there's just so many neat opportunities that you can do those explorations and then see what happens. And when I come back and talk to the students, yeah, it does bring back all of this. And it's like kind of, I get to relive it all a little bit. And then over the years, you know, my career has evolved, so the talk has evolved, but the foundation of it is the same. And you can do that by doing what somebody's telling you to do, or you can do it by trying to figure out what you want to do with it.