Reflections

It’s been 12 years since I took any sort of extended break. In 2007 I took about a year and a half break from my undergraduate studies to figure out what I wanted to do with my education — it was incredibly helpful, and when I returned to school in 2009 I was a far better student. I finished my bachelors in the summer of 2011 (checking off a freshman writing course I needed to graduate), and then went to grad school that same fall. I did a three year Master’s at UCSB under Dr. Dar Roberts, working on research thru the summers as you do in graduate school, and then immediately started working for my PhD Advisor Dr. Waleed Abdalati, at CU in the summer of 2014 even as I continued to draw a 25% appointment to close up projects back at UCSB. I defended in 2019, and then had two and a half weeks before I started working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Colorado School of Mines, with Matthew Siegfried. I secured a position as an Assistant Scientist for the ICESat-2 Project Science office at NASA Goddard (Section 615) — a fantastic opportunity that took me from Boulder, CO to Washington, DC… with the 2021 three day Martin Luther King weekend being the only time that separated my employment at Mines from the start of my time at NASA. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) recruited me while I was at NASA, offering a position as Research & Development Scientist. I actually initially declined, but NGA made a revised offer that would have me skip a full GS equivalent grade within the Federal Government, and I was curious to see what that world looked like behind the curtain. Since I loved my project at NASA, I elected to keep working on it as long as possible, and took two days off (a weekend) in November of 2021 between ending my role as a NASA contractor and starting as a civil servant within the Intelligence Community.

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