When I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1994, I was 22 years old, held a newly minted diploma for a BA in English, and had almost no idea what I was going to do with my life.  Had some messenger from the future appeared before me at that time and announced that in a little over a decade I’d be graduating with a masters in library information science and would have three years as a secondary school librarian under my belt, I would probably have greeted this news with a mixture of surprise and relief - surprise that I would choose a career that I had never considered at that point in my life, and relief that I would ultimately find myself in a field I have long considered noble and important.

My path from inexperienced recent college grad to older and somewhat wiser soon-to-be graduate of the Information School has covered a lot of terrain, both physically and metaphorically.  During that time, I’ve spent a year and a half traveling across the United States, taking odd jobs for short periods in places such as Sedona, Arizona, Crater Lake National Park, and Austin, Texas.  I’ve spent another year and half waiting tables at fine dining establishments and briefly considered a career as a sommelier.  Instead, I took a position as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher in Corabia, Romania, a small agricultural town situated on the banks of the Danube River.  Thus began my career in education.  I returned to the States after fulfilling my year-long contract in Romania, earned a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) at Southern Oregon University, and spent the next three years teaching high school English at Lakes High School in Lakewood, Washington.

It was during my time as a classroom teacher that I began developing an interest in becoming a librarian.  Ever since my pre-kindergarten years, when my mother would take me to the weekly “story hour” at the public library in my hometown of Utica, Michigan, I have enjoyed visiting libraries and using - or learning to use - their resources.  As I grew older, I developed a complimentary interest in the research process, voluntarily taking on extra credit projects in junior high and high school that would require me to do research at the library.  With the advent of the World Wide Web, this interest would extend to digital information sources accessed beyond the library walls.  As a classroom teacher, though, I found that many of my students did not have the same love of libraries and research.  Part of the reason for this was that they had not developed a love of reading.  Another part was that they had never been taught how to use the library effectively.  And so, as I grew as a teacher, I found myself dedicating more and more class time to encouraging a love of reading in my students and teaching information literacy skills.  Ultimately, I would enroll in the University of Washington Extension’s Certificate Program for the School Library Professional, graduating with a State of Washington library media teaching endorsement and accepting my first job as a school librarian at Decatur High School in 2004.  Wanting to learn more about my newly chosen profession and to expand my professional options, I enrolled in the UW Information School’s dMLIS Program that same year.  Since then, I’ve taken a library position at Lakeside School in Seattle and have developed number of additional interests within the field of library information science, including copyright law, cataloging, and database design.

This website exhibits some of the work I’ve completed and the skills I’ve developed over the three years I’ve spent as a dMLIS student and an information professional.

To contact me, please refer to the contact information on my resume or email me.