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One of my favorite things about being an epidemiologist is just the variety to the job. There’s
never a boring day, and really being able to go after those answers to research questions.
That I myself can go out and try to find the answers. And I absolutely love my job. I feel
like I’m doing a good thing. I’m impacting, potentially, workers’ lives. There’s just
no price you can put on that. My mother works at NIOSH and has been there
since I was a young child. My mom brought me in for mother-daughter day
probably in my mid-teens, and I got to see what epidemiologists do and I got to hang
out with industrial hygienists and other researchers and kind of see what they do. That was sort
of my first introduction. I never expected to be in epidemiology. I
started out wanting to be a teacher, and then I couldn’t afford to go to school, and then
when I could afford to go to school, I thought, I’m going to be a clinical psychologist.
So I went into psychology. One of the reasons I went into psychology was there was no math
or science, or so I thought. And then they required statistics.
The teaching assistant for that course really had a huge influence on my trajectory into
the field of science. She got me through that course. She really helped me with statistics,
but more than that, she said, look you need to be a research assistant. You need to get
into the honors program. You need to be a teaching assistant. Here are the things you
need to do to go forward. And without her, I don’t think I would have done well. I
don’t think I would have stayed in science. She really had a huge impact on my life.
When I was thinking about a Ph.D. program, I thought, I can’t really do that. Those
are super-smart people and I don’t really have those kind of qualities. I decided to
go ahead and try it anyway. And when I tried it was like wait a minute, I can do this.
I found out it really had more to do with just sticking with it and less to do with
being super smart. We want to make sure we’re employing the
best measures to protect workers. And we don’t want to guess about what those best measures
are. We actually want to find evidence to say these are working, these are not working,
and then employ those preventive measures. When I’m doing research, I can look for
the most accurate answer possible. I don’t have to worry about what that answer is. There
is not an answer that I “should” find. It is what it is, and we can go with it.
You want to make sure that the job you love doesn’t become the job you hate because
it’s taking over your entire life. So I really try to set aside time for family, for
friends, for spiritual life, for sports. It just really makes you a more effective person
when you come to the job. If you have any interest in science at all,
or even if you don’t, try it. You’re not going to know until you try it whether or
not you can do it, which you probably can and whether or not you’re going to like
it. And you may just love it. That’s what happened to me. I thought I couldn’t do
it. I was wrong. I could do it. I could do it well, and I ended up loving it.