Most young girls want to be a veterenarian or teacher. I was that nerd who wanted to build robots. As you can imagine, I was and still am quite cool.
But going to school in my hometown of Los Alamos (yes that Los Alamos) was hard. Most of my peers seemed to know how to study naturally, and I was not born with that skillset. I almost didn't graduate because I "struggled" with math and science (meaning, it didn't come naturally to me, so I assumed I was no good at it and stopped handing in assignments).
If you think that knocked the wind out of the sails of my robotics dream, you would be right.
Most of my friends went off to the ivy league school their parents went to. My parents went to the University of North Dakota, and well... that's not exactly a school known for robotics. As one of the only kids with parents who didn't have PhD after their name, I had to start from scratch.
I didn't have the grades to get into college by myself, so I joined the military. After I failed out of military language school, the Marine Corps made me a data scientist.
At the time, it was devastating to have yet another failure, but that was the best thing that ever happened to me long-term.
I shortly found myself in Iraq leading a team of other data scientists doing research and writing classified reports, some of which landed on the desk of the President. It was easy to push myself to be the best because I truly loved my job.
But I quickly learned that the rigidity and structure of the Department of Defense wasn't for me. The two biggest things were waking up early and wearing my hair in a bun every day. The easy thing would have been to suck it up and make a somewhat easy career out of the military, but I decided to get out and go to college.
The first few months I wondered, "was that a gigantic mistake? I never was that great at school."
But now I know it wasn't a mistake. I got my MBA and now as I finish my PhD, I realize how great it is to have the freedom to choose what projects I work on. Oh, and being able to wear my hair however I want. Most importantly, I have learned that there are specific projects I like and others that I don't.
My favorite thing about being in the civilian sector is having the freedom to choose what I work on and being able to use my talents to contribute to the most ground-breaking research and help businesses I love compete with larger companies. As a life-long underdog, I love seeing the smaller guys win, but if the bigger guys have a great project that benefits everyone, I'm open to that too.
I built an algorithm to classify images of galaxies that are billions or tens of billions of light years away,
I made a fraud-detector algorithm for a financial services company.
I built and continue to maintain stock and options trading algorithms for that same financial services company.
I've used data science to research supply chain issues for local companies.
I helped a retail company out-compete a larger company by making an algorithm to redesign their floor layout.
I used AI to detect and predict changes in consumer behavior before they happened.
And yes, of course I've built robotics algorithms.