I've taken sort of a roundabout route of getting to where I am today.

For the first 21 years of my life, I planned for a career in science, but less than a semester before I was set to graduate with a degree in mathematics and economics, I decided that theoretical math and I will never get along, and I dropped out.

After nine months, I decided to switch and get a degree in my second passion - communication. The focus of my undergraduate degree was on visual communication and new media, and after more than two years working in a newsroom (which was simultaneously incredibly exhausting and one of the best experiences of my life), I decided I'd rather spend my time as an academic than in the office.

I've always loved watching TV, and when the Internet came along, that love became even more interesting with the addition of online forums and spoilers, and I was hooked. The idea of building communities with people across the country or around the world joined only by a common interest or passion is fascinating to me. That interest was the focus of my master's degree work at the University of Utah.

Unfortunately, after a year, I had to admit that as much as I love thinking about communication theories, becoming a professional academic requires a unique dedication and passion, and I couldn't see myself doing that forever.

So after admitting - twice - that my future plans for myself weren't going to work, I spent a few months trying to figure out what to do. I decided to try a couple of introductory accounting classes online through the local community college to see if that's is something I could see myself doing. I've always loved math and numbers, and accounting has been something at the back of my mind as a "maybe." It turns out that "maybe" was actually really enjoyable, and I'm hooked. I'd planned on just getting my associate's degree, but I decided to keep going and found a program at Southern Utah University that allowed me to complete my bachelor's degree entirely online.

I spent six months working as an accounting intern at ClearOne here in Salt Lake City, and that experience only made me more excited to step out into the "real world" and use my skills in Excel (I love figuring out how to make lots of work take not a lot of time thanks to some tricky Excel forumlas) and all things accounting-related to find a job I love in my new field. I've just finished my degree and am now looking forward into stepping into the accounting profession in a part-time capacity.

Some people know exactly what they want to be when the grow up, and they work on that from the age of four. Others change their minds a couple times. I'm definitely the second kind of person. I've tried several different kinds of things and they didn't work out. I could see that as a failure and be disappointed, but I think my different experiences have taught me a lot about who I am as a person and what I'm capable of. Those experiences make me a stronger person and I can use them to my advantage in the future, both personally and professionally.

Thanks to my communication degree, I have both academic and professional experience in writing for the web. I am a social media addict, and have also used Facebook and Twitter professionally while working in a newsroom. I have experience with HTML, CSS and WordPress, both front-end and more behind-the-scenes.

I have experience with Adobe products, especially Photoshop (one of my favorite hobbies is making terrible Photoshops) and Dreamweaver, although I've also worked with Acrobat, InDesign and Premiere. I have experience with both film and digital photography, including the black-and-white film darkroom.

I've always loved statistics, and I get a thrill out of reading the social statistics reports from the Pew Research Center. I've been known to pull out Census data and do some mathematical calculations to win arguments with friends and family. My focus for my math degree was statistics, so I have classroom experience with applied statistics as well as several classes on economic statistics (including a course on the economics of sex, drugs and crime, which was fascinating).