My Story

I have lead an unorthodox life in many respects.

I was raised homeschooled, vegetarian, and rural in an anti-vax household with little access to outside social groups and infinite access to nature. My parents were close and caring, and supplied me with tools and second-hand materials for home projects. By the age of 9 I loved woodworking and using my grandfather’s electrical dremel, and I had come up with a design for wooden lockets to give to my grandparents. I braced a hacksaw between some heavy boxes and set about hand-sawing the locket shapes. My parents noticed this effort, and gave my my first power tool at the age of ten - a RYOBI scroll saw, which I immediately set about using for dozens of projects. At age 11 I was put in charge of the family garden, and I tracked the species, planting location, planting time and transplanting time data in an excel spreadsheet on my first computer. This ultimately lead to the design and construction of my first building when I was 13 years old. It was a greenhouse to support cultivating all the plants I wanted to grow. I had such a good time designing the building on graph paper that my parents enrolled me in an architecture day camp at Taliesin the following summer. This was my first time really interacting with child peers on my own, and because I had prior experience using SketchUp from my woodworking hobby, and prior experience making a building my design submission was head and shoulders above the rest in its level of sophistication. It was a dream house for my parents that terraced down a hill with photovoltaic operable louvers.

The first time I set foot in a typical classroom setting I was 18 years old attending Western Technical College. I expected that I would be shy and unsocialized compared to the other students, but quickly found the opposite to be true. I was overjoyed to have a teacher in the same room, and would ask lots of questions and pay close attention to class, meanwhile my classmates mainly kept their heads down, asked few questions, and looked at me sideways for being an “overachiever”.

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