When I try to describe myself I feel the need to start out by saying, “I’m a little bit of a lot of things,” and that is because I’ve lived in multiple places, I’ve shifted my career a couple of times, and I have a range of interests. With this being said, let’s begin where it all started, which I guess would be Maine or New Hampshire or maybe Iowa… see it’s complicated.
I like to describe myself as being from Southern Maine, which is technically where I was born, but after a short one-year stint in New Hampshire, my family moved to Iowa. We were only supposed to be in Iowa for five years, but ultimately we ended up there for 13 years, until my freshman year of high school when we moved back home to Maine.
During my high school years, I was very involved in local activism, launching initiatives such as the Positivity Project for counteracting depression in students and teachers, amending my high school’s bullying policy, starting a youth lighthouse preservation association, and organizing a coalition of students working to prevent gun violence in schools. As I planned for my future though, I wanted to move to a big city to expand my understanding of issues that, with privilege, I never had to deal with in such a diffusely populated state. That is one of the reasons I decided to go to Loyola University Chicago for undergraduate and graduate school.
During college, I started out on a track to become a broadcast journalist, but I shortly realized I couldn’t spend my life in a newsroom. With this development, I also uncovered new interests in marketing strategy, consultation, anthropology, and business development. My switch to a Public Relations major helped me find my university’s student-run communications agency, Inigo Communications, which I shortly started working for as an Account Coordinator. After a semester I was promoted to a leadership role, serving as the New Business and Finance Director, which involved pitching new business for the agency, closing renewal business with clients such as United Airlines and the American Heart Association, and managing the agency’s invoicing and expenses.
In my time with Inigo Communications, we were at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was drastically affecting small businesses’ success. With the goal of teaching small business owners how to market themselves with “free” owned, earned, and shared resources such as website SEO, social media, and reviews, the agency launched Inigo Ignite. This branch of the agency offered free 30-minute speed consultations that analyzed businesses’ current marketing state and offered recommendations within the realms of branding, SEO, SEM, web design, Google analytics, and social media.
Going into my senior year of college, my tenure with Inigo ended as I received an opportunity to get an early start on my career within the cybersecurity industry doing business development work. On my first day of work, while learning about a slew of new topics, I asked myself, “What have I gotten myself into? There’s no way that I’ll ever learn any of these topics”, but with the help of amazing colleagues and mentors I was able to accelerate my knowledge quickly and one year into working at the company was promoted to a Risk Management and Governance Sales Specialist.
Over the course of two years, I worked full-time while finishing my undergraduate and graduate degrees. During the day I was a cybersecurity professional working with the organization to develop strategies to grow our pipeline of revenue within compliance services, then by night, I was an academic working on her MS in Global Strategic Communications. There were many late nights, tears, and maybe a few occurrences where I was ready to drop out, but I created work that I am exceptionally proud of. This included academic research on the effect of Corporate Ethical Climate on Artificial Intelligence’ discriminatory tendencies and a Crisis Communication rebranding plan for Leidos Inc.
So, I guess that leads me to where I am today. Currently, I am still a cybersecurity professional, I’m a graduate, I’m interested in AI and communications ethics, I play ice hockey and rock climb, I try to read a book a week (although that usually doesn’t go according to plan), I now live in Southern Maine again, and ultimately I want to explore the world as much as possible.
If you are interested in working with me or learning more about me, feel free to reach out through my contact page or on social!