I solve problems on both sides of the screen

I moved from Texas to Miami with Teach for America and taught 9th grade English, where I learned how to adapt quickly, understand the people in front of me, and figure out what might actually help them. Turns out, that's not so different from understanding a customer and solving their problems.

That's also where I started writing professionally. I'd studied English with a creative writing emphasis at Texas State, so the writing itself wasn't new—but part-time copy for a locally owned cosmetics brand, then a full-time SEO role, taught me to write for wildly different audiences and subject matters.

After 3 years in Miami, I moved to San Diego for an M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing. Partway through the program, I landed a content design role at Intuit working on Mint and spent the next chapter attending school full-time and working full-time simultaneously, which I don't recommend and would absolutely do again.

Mint taught me that most content problems are structure problems in disguise. If the words don't come easy, the idea underneath them probably needs attention.

I kept solving those structure problems in bigger rooms—a storyboarding series for my team, then a new ops team after the content design team was dissolved. The VP of Design told me why he thought I'd fit: I'd turned 12 weeks of ambiguity into something tangible the team could act on.

Two things that aren't on my résumé

I've been writing poetry since I was eight. In 2013, one of my poems made it into Slippery Elm, the University of Findlay's literary journal, online and in print—which meant getting to hold an actual book with my name inside it.

The poem is about wanting to experience all the things and places the world has to offer. You can read it here.

I wrote it before I'd really been anywhere. More than a decade later, I've been to over 20 countries and done a lot of what that young woman was hoping for—plus a fair amount she never even thought of.