>> 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.