>> I'm very fortunate in my life that I have known what I've wanted
to do since my earliest memories.
My parents tell me though memories of this is spotty considering my age,
but my parents have told me that when I was 3 years old,
upon leaving the Natural History Museum in Manhattan, I told them that when I grow
up I wanted to become a biologist.
This is a natural reaction to my curiosity.
I'm curious about a lot of things but I'm most curious about nature.
So, that aspect of being a biologist was very important to me because in growing
up I pursued it voraciously not just in my own reading and writings and research that I did
as a child but also in my philanthropic work.
I'm very lucky that I was able to volunteer places.
Growing up my parents really supported me in doing that and places
that I volunteered were science based places - The Seaquarium- an Oceanographic Society
in Stuart, Florida, the Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Center.
These were places I began volunteering at 12, you know,
and grew up in these places volunteering, understanding it, watching what was going on
and that just kind of further fed this aspect of wanting to become a biologist.
And then professionally it was a combination of right timing, luck,
and also the fact that I'm very good at what I do and that I take my job very seriously.
Now, IDEAS was not my first job out of Rollins.
I'm very, very lucky that 44 days after I graduated I was scooped
up by a Nature Preserve, actually.
And, through mutual friends who I met in the community in going out and talking to people,
they essentially said, hey, we have this incredible friend who's just built a
Nature Preserve.
They've raised 3 million dollars over 10 years, they built the building,
they don't have any grants, they have no educational displays, they have no curriculum,
they have no signage around the preserve would you help?
Of course, I would help, you know.
They said, well we've got a lead on a grant, you know, how about you go and try for it.
I said, well I've never written a grant in my life, but I've written scholarly papers
about cloning DNA and lizard hybridization and starfish and all of this kind of stuff,
you know, I have a great love of language, of romantic era English poetry, and American poetry
and that kind of thing, so I can write.
So, I said, well sure I'll try, you know.
And, I was the only employee as the Director of Education and the Head Curator for 2 years
and as I said I did everything from put toilet paper on the toilet paper roll,
to work on budgeting other grants, teaching every student that poured through there
but because I had been thinking and reading and playing around with biology in my room
since I was 3, at 22 years old I literally had a decade or more of actual job experience
from volunteering at these places since I was 12 and before that,
almost another decade of studying my craft.
It was literally a celebration of everything that I had done since I was 3 and I finally got
to do it carte blanche at 22 years old.
When I left the preserve, I had already met the founder of IDEAS for Us and we said,
all right, let's do it, let's go.
But, to really hit it off we wanted to move that nonprofit route.
Well, we decided that it was the right move.
I wrote up the bylaws, I wrote up the paperwork for the IRS, and I knew how to do
that because I worked at this little preserve and I saw them do it.
I knew how to work board meetings.
I knew how to use Robert's Rules of Order.
It was stuff that I just absorbed from seeing the Nature Preserve run.
So, we just cloned it over to the IDEAS organization and happily enough in May
of 2012 we received word from the United Nations
that we became an official United Nations accredited organization and in June I flew
to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to represent the United States
at the Rio plus 20 Sustainability Conference.
But, it all goes back to the fact that I relentlessly pursued what I loved
and never thought about the career or job that I could get.
I just knew that if I followed what I loved,
the rest would wind upcoming and luckily I was right.