Math has been a love of mine since I was a child. The patterns math unlocks are beautiful to me. My father was a math teacher in Colorado, and so the choice to pursue a degree in math education was an easy one for me. Upon graduation from college, I accepted a position teaching high school math classes at a small school in Idaho.

I taught math for a total of nine years, and I loved interacting with the students the subject matter I taught. Over the course of the nine years, though, I realized I did not love the system in which I was teaching. I felt boxed in by the overemphasis on testing. I wanted to expand my teaching to involve more problem solving skills (including incorporating computer programming), but the administration believed that approach would decrease the overall testing aptitude of the students.

Due to this philosophical disagreement, I made the difficult decision to move on from teaching. My family and I moved back to Colorado, and I wanted to find a job that would provide for my family more completely than teaching did. This desire led me to become a two-way radio technician, which is a job I held for about two years. I learned during this time that just providing for my family did not provide the personal fulfillment that I needed. I want to provide for my family and do something that is societally valuable, challenging, and personally rewarding. I believe those goals all point to computer programming for me. These goals continue to motivate me as I journey through Turing and look forward to a new career.