>> I grew up in the Washington D.C. area in Northern Virginia and then I decided to come
to Penn State because I wanted to be a meteorologist.
I discovered I wanted to be a meteorologist about middle school time period, coincidentally,
when the movie "Twister" came out.
I'm not going to lie, but I was actually very interested in winter weather.
I honestly loved the idea of listening to the radio in the morning to find
out if school was cancelled or delayed and I kind of wanted to be that person.
I wanted to be able to make the call and understand why.
And fast forward about 15 years, I'm a forecaster in Reno, Nevada.
It's a midnight shift.
It's 3:00 in the morning and I get a call from a school superintendent as a snowsquall is coming
in from the west and she asks me what's the snow looking like.
What do you think I should do with school and I can't tell her what her decision should be,
but I did get to tell her that the snowsquall was going to hit between 6:00 a.m.
and 10:00 a.m. and it was going to drop about a foot of snow.
So she put that together and cancelled school and I remember hanging up the phone and looking
at my colleagues and being like, I think I just achieved my career goal.
I don't know what to do now [laughter].