I have spent my professional career learning, improving, and evolving. I draw inspiration from my personal life to improve my professional life, because this seems natural to me. Personally, I’m a fun, highly organized, curious type of person. I love listening to podcasts on design and ones that allow me to explore the world or offer new insights/perspectives on subjects (I highly recommend 99% Invisible, Hidden Brain, and Invisibilia). In college I majored in Geography and took Geographic Information System courses (GIS) and loved them. Learning Arcmap software was challenging, but that’s what made it fun. Purely by chance I would later find a role that had me using that same Arcmap software every day. But before that I worked at Walmart for five years, which I realize many don’t consider retail to be a professional environment, but I believe it gave me the best foundation to be a professional in my current and future roles. I learned hard work, dedication, self-motivation, teamwork, and that there is no such thing as “that’s not my job”. You do any job that is asked of you, because that is what is needed to give the customers a good experience. I learned how to be a cashier, how to mix paint, work photo machines, inventory control, claims process, and two of the most physically demanding jobs unload a truck and push carts (you try pushing carts in a parking lot, in Arkansas in the summer when it is 87 degrees). I loved learning all those roles and it helped me appreciate just how much work is required to keep a business running smoothly, and the interconnectedness of an organization. Each person doing their job so someone else can do theirs. In my current role, I use Arcmap, SAP, filenet, and Microsoft office to analyze and validate our records and find and correct discrepancies between the record and the GIS database. Every record validated this way saves our crews time that they would spend going out to the site to dig, which in turn saves money (one estimate is at least 2 hours on site charged at $200 per hour). I like to think I’m an amateur detective who reviews records, goes over the details, finds the issue, and then proposes a resolution. This requires collaboration with different departments and diving deep at times to discover the issue.