Getting to Know Me

I've thought to myself it might be a good idea to tell the world about me and why anyone should give a hoot as to what I say. The following is my biography in the context of engineering and computing.

I was born in Milwaukee, WI. My dad is a chemical engineer with a dissertation in progress in management information systems. My mom has an art degree and is a killer cook. I have three sisters; the oldest is a biomedical engineer who works for a large pharmaceuticals firm, the second oldest is a chemical engineer/patent lawyer and my youngest sister is a linguistists teacher currently living in the Czech Republic.

In middle school we used Apple II's and played with a little program called Turtle graphics. I thought this was a blast and was hooked.

At home my dad was a huge influence on my desire to play with computers. Dad taught C at the local university in addition to his day job as a system engineer at Allen-Bradley. Our basement was filled with musty punchcards and punchtape. My sisters and I used to scoop out the punches from the tape machine and have confetti fights with it. At night mysterious squeaky noises emanated from dad's home office (his 750 baud modem) and he typed away in the amber glow of his VAX terminal. When I was about 8 years old he brought home a "portable computer" with a built-in keyboard. Dad taught me how to make a simple "Hello World" program on that thing in what I *think* was FORTRAN 77.


In 1985 we got our first Mac. I spent hours on hours playing with MacPaint. After a while I discovered Hypercard, which I used to make my own "Choose you own adventure" stories.


My dad, being the original early adopter, had a Commodore 64 and an Atari gaming system hooked up to our living room TV. Everyone in the house knew how to operate these, except for my mom. She often encouraged us to play outside but we were much more into playing Asteroids.


Fast forward a few years to high school. 1991: I send my first ever email to my then boyfriend who was away at math camp. It was probably the least steamy love-letter in the world, since I used my dad's email account to send it. All my friends were either Goths, geeks or both.


Ahh. Then college. I picked UW-Platteville becuase it had the right combination of being in-state (read: "cheap"), having an engineering program and being as far as you can be from my parents and still possess the aforementioned qualities. On a whim I walked into the computing center and asked around if they were hiring student workers. As luck would have it, I ran into a woman who was trying to set up a new help-desk to serve faculty and staff. I was one of the first few students hired for the job and worked there for 4 years.


I chose civil engineering with an environmental minor because I had a crush on one of the professors. My grades were OK. My real passion was the help-desk. My social life revolved around my job. We bopped around campus armed with floppy disks fixing, installing and coaching. I supported WordPerfect, Windows 3.11, Novell, Appletalk and myriad other software including AutoCAD 11.


This is where I met my now husband. Mark was hired after gradschool to implement Peoplesoft on campus. It just so happened that the Helpdesk and the PeopleSoft team were on the same floor. I distinctly remember watching him walk down the hallway through the windows, then turning to my girlfriends, "I am, like, totally going to marry that guy." I wrote a script for the VMS system to alert me when he logged in or out. Ahh, geek love.


After a rough semester internship at an ENR top 10 civil engineering firm, I had a quarter-life crisis and decided to join the Peace Corps after graduation. In the Peace Corps I was charged with organizing wastewater treatment plant data that was collected by the volunteer in the spot before me. I knew that this would best be done with a database so I took it upon myself to learn Access. By the end of my stint we were synchronizing my little database between regional Ministry of Health offices via modem to a central server.

After my return I got a limited term contract with WisDOT in the traffic section. It was great experience and solidified my devotion to the civil engineering profession. When my term was up I took a shot in the dark and sent my resume to a engineering software firm located in Dubuque, IA. It was the best decision of my life. I learned more in the first year at Eagle Point than I did in 4+ years of engineering school. I traveled all over North America teaching and demoing. To this day I consider my former co-workers some of my best friends.

During my stint at Eagle Point, I reconnected with my now hubby. Things went well (obviously) and when he took a job in Milwaukee, I went with him. Looking for a change of scenery myself I decided to try working for a small civil engineering firm. It was great experience but I missed the pace and techie-goodness of the software industry. Besides, the coffee sucked.

That leads me to today. I am now working as one of two civil AE's at Mastergraphics, the fabulous Autodesk reseller headquartered in Madison, WI. I love my job and life kicks ass. I am currently teaching myself Autocad VBA and VBA.NET. I train lots and lots of Civil 3D and Autocad. My 3-year work anniversary will be this July.

If you are still awake, thanks for reading.