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I actually went through that whole process and looked up all these different career opportunities that I can do, and engineering stuck.
Because I was like, okay, it's very broad and if I want to change my major it's not a far leap from being a civil engineer to being a mechanical engineer.
So I was like, okay, I can try this out. And I test the waters, and i enjoyed it.
What ultimately happened was I started my undergraduate curriculum in civil engineering.
And through that I began to be interested in recycled materials and trying to be more sustainable and things of that nature.
And I started to find out what I was actually interested in, in that curriculum, and I started to become attracted to the whole transportation industry
and seeing lots of room for innovation and ways to take some of the things I was passionate about and funnel it into this, and make it into a career.
I became involved in our region, in the Northwest Region.
And associated with the affiliated tribes of northwest Indians.
There they had a subcommittee on transportation. So I started to attend that and really liked what was going on with the committee members.
And they kind of served as the role models for me.
The subjects that most grabbed me were history and wood-shop, architectural drawing, a lot of the hands-on.
And I think that really prepared me for getting into the engineering world.
It helped me think spacially, and mathematics helped a lot as well.
As I was doing my job search, in terms of what I wanted to study in college, I came across a job encyclopedia, if you will,
with traffic engineering being one of those categories that sort of caught my interest.
And I interned, or job shadowed with a local traffic engineering firm back home in Hawaii,
and really liked it for that summer and so I decided that was something that I really wanted to do for the rest of my life.
When I realized that there was this whole area of urban planning and statistical modeling to look at how people and why people are traveling, it sort of opened my eyes.
It's like that saying, 'shoot for the moon, if you miss you'll land amongst the stars.' And now I work for Dr. Clifton at Portland State University.