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A little about me. I was born in Gainesville, Florida (the armpit
of Florida). My parents moved several times and then wound up
taking me to Africa when they became missionaries. After living
in Monrovia, Liberia for a couple years we transferred to Montevideo,
Uruguay with a year's soujourn in San Jose, Costa Rica for language
school.
After graduating from high school in Montevideo, I got this crazy idea
that I wanted to fly F-15's, so I went to the Air Force Academy.
After finding out the Air Force pilots are on the flight line at 4:00
in the morning, I decided that I didn't want to fly, and then decided
that the Air Force and I didn't get along so well.
I moved to West Palm Beach, FL and went to Palm Beach Atlantic College
where my brother and several of my other friends were also attending.
I graduated with a degree in Biology with a Chemistry minor, thinking
perhaps to go into medical school. But before graduating I decided
that I did not want to go to medical school.
After graduating, I looked for a job, but decided that I should go
back to school...again. So while I worked part time at the Breaker's
Hotel, I took the GRE and applied to UF (Gainesville) for exercise physiology:
applied physiology. I got a phone call telling me that my advisor
had lost his grant and left and so had my assistantship. The next
closest area was muscle physiology. Oh, okay.
Well, when I moved to Gainesville and interviewed my new advisor, I
found out that I did not want to do muscle physiology, which is the
molecular study of rat diaphragm muscle fibers with no application whatsoever.
So I did not enroll.
Now I was stuck without a job or classes in the armpit of Florida.
The job market here is worse than West Palm Beach. The going
rate for someone with a bachelor's degree and a slew of skills in Gainesville
is minimum wage. I made up a resume emphasizing my computer experience,
and wound up interviewing with Holbrook Travel with whom I was to be
employed in one or another for the next five years.
While in Gainesville, a friend of mine from Miami taught me to dance
Salsa and Merengue, but I could never make the girl do any cool turns,
so I took some dance lessons at the Maria Alvarez Imperial Dance Studio.
I started going to the social dances and picked up some of the other
dances. I volunteered to take part in a charity dance exhibition.
Finally, they told me that I was hanging around so much that I was going
to have to start teaching, so I've been a dance instructor ever since.
Some might consider my crowning achievement something like dancing Swing
in front of sixty thousand people at Gator Growl, but I consider it
to be when my Latin friends tell me that I dance better salsa than they
do.
Meanwhile back at Holbrook Travel, trouble was brewing. I was
becoming restless, and God was smacking me around. Finally, I
decided to go back to school and get a nursing degree. I put myself
through nursing school by doing the dancing thing and working part time
at Holbrook Travel as their webmaster (using skills put to good use
here). I graduated in 1999 with a bachelor of Nursing Science;
I went back for a Master's degree; I was also in a concurrent Ph.D.
program, but when I graduated with the Master's (Dec 2000), I took a
leave of absence so as to pursue a career for a bit. I'd been a nursing
student for four years and it was time to make some money, stop having
homework, and do work that I have more ownership of.
January 2001
So now, I'm awating my licensure as a nurse practitioner and beginning
to interview. The job that sounds most interesting is working with regeneration
technologies. A biotechnology company that The company develops medical
devices. Just like drugs are required to go through clinical trials,
so are medical devices. They need someone to be their clinical trials
coordinator. It would be extremely interesting work. So I'm waiting
to see what is going to happen with that.
June 2002
Well, it's been a while since I updated this page. In the mean time,
let's see what has happened.
- I went back to school again for my Ph.D. in nursing. I passed
my qualifying exams in May and am collecting data for my dissertation.
I plan to graduate May 2003.
- I started working as a Nurse Practitioner for Gainesville
Family Physicians. I work there as a physician extender abotu
twenty to thirty hours a week.
- And most importantly of all, I got engaged
to that hot babe I've been dating for the past two years.
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