According to all of the personality and trait assessments, I am an opportunist with a heart of gold that thinks about everything all the time. Which is reflected in a pivot-filled career history geared towards systems change. My top "Clifton Strengths" are Connectedness, Intellectual, Input, Learner, and Individualization. I may be the rule rather than the exception, but it is funny how much these strengths bleed into each other. Connectedness makes sense: as a biology teacher I would have students write essays about why all living beings are just carbon with issues, I enjoy systems thinking and love most things metatextual. As an "intellectual" I am most comfortable being inside my head, often asking myself how one things relate to another or if something is a pattern rather than chaos. As a sustainability person, I often feel bad for how much I just love stuff. I love collecting comic books, ideas, jokes, dumb podcasts, friends, bouncy balls, experiences, action figures, plants, reflections, vinyl records, stickers, ruminations, clothes, connections, art, and hobbies. My "inputs" of knowledge and things have made me aware of how little I know. This ignorance/humility allows and encourages me to a "learners" approach with each experience and individual. My brief experience as an evolutionary biologist was spent mostly asking the question of "what phenotype matters?" Each of us are products of our evolutionary histories, and these histories are unique on an ecosystem level as well as an "individual" one. According to the DISC assessments, I am both a vibes person and opportunistic. I like to see the best in people and situations, and will try to leverage problems into opportunities. Nothing we do exists in a vacuum, so I am more interested in creating reciprocal growth within an ecosystem rather than transactional interactions.