My undergrad from EWU was in Outdoor Recreation and my first jobs were all education-based, which sounds like a strange place to start a career in project management. However, my undergrad focused heavily on group dynamics, experiential education and managing groups of people in challenging outdoor settings. These skills taught me how to interact with a variety people in stressful settings and deal with continually changing situations. After graduating, I lived in Korea teaching English to a room full of kindergartners - a true test of any manager. Then, I was the program director for an non-profit experiential education camp in Hawaii; I managed twelve employees and over a hundred kids on a 150-acre property. There I honed my time and personnel management skills. When I returned to Washington to marry my partner, my career pivoted again, and it was here that I entered into project management. In this position, I have been able to use the skills that I have learned in my previous jobs to manage commercial and residential renovations and repairs. In September I will graduate from University of Southern California with a Masters of Science in Project Management.