>> While I was attending Rollins -- well,
before I even started attending Rollins,
my next door neighbor here in Orlando was
the director of the Florida Department
of Law Enforcement Crime Lab here in Orlando.
So, he helped me with my high school
science fair projects that I did
on forensic differences between identical twins.
I have a twin sister that I lived with then.
She attended UCF and I attended Rollins.
But he introduced me to what
forensic science was.
And it seemed like a good career here.
It wasn't really what I loved about
forensic science because we did mostly DNA.
We did latent fingerprints.
And then while I was attending
Rollins, I did an internship
with the Orange County Sheriff's Office here and
also with the Federal Bureau of Investigation
in Washington D.C., which is an
excellent internship program --
both in latent fingerprints and both helped
me to come up with my Rollins thesis,
my honors thesis here, which was
synthesizing in a hydrant analogue for looking
for fingerprints on -- I'm not really sure.
I don't remember that.
Looking at -- a different in hydrant analogue
to look at -- to develop fingerprints with.
Really liked forensic science as far as
that went, so I went on to graduate school.
At the time there were only eight
graduate programs in forensic science
and Virginia Commonwealth
University had one of the best.
So, I went to VCU for graduate school, and
while I was there was introduced to some
of the more intricate parts of forensic science,
one of those being trace evidence,
which is more applied chemistry.
So, that would allow me to utilize my
entire chemistry background and degree,
which Rollins prepared me for very
well as far as the entry notation.
Coming in from Rollins seemed to me a much
better step than some of the larger universities
because I had such hands-on experience
with a lot of the instruments
and with analyzing the results that you just
can get when you have such a small class
of chemistry majors as opposed
to a couple hundred.
So, I came in very prepared for that.
I worked at a pharmaceutical company while I
was in graduate school, doing quality control
and instrument maintenance on top
of their instrumentation as well,
and both of those things suited
me very well for my career.