Introduction
“I am probably not what people would expect to see when deciding what a college student at UF looks like. At 41 l am an older returning student, and I am double majoring in geography and anthropology, both online only. As a teenager life kind of got in the way of me following my plans to go to college as a more traditional student. As a young adult I had a variety of jobs and, when my husband and I became parents, I decided to be a stay-at-home mom. As my kids started growing up, I started being haunted by the question of what I was going to do once they were all out on their own. I was lucky enough to come back to school and follow my lifelong interests academically.”
Why Geography Online?
“Essentially, I found that I could go to the best school in Florida, work around my schedule by being an online student, follow my dreams, take a wide range of top-notch classes covering the wide range of geographic possibilities, learn from leaders in the field, and graduate with the knowledge and credentials to make me a desirable candidate for employers.”
Favorite Courses
“The Geospatial Information classes have been both extremely interesting and challenging. I was nervous at first to jump into them. Having been out of the workforce for a bit, and never having felt very tech savvy, I was intimidated thinking about the varietv of software programs I would need to learn and use regularly. You hear you are going to start manipulating satellite imagery and using programs used by organizations like NASA and it is easy to feel out of your depth. But the more I learned, the more fun it became, and my confidence grew. Now I can crank out images and maps and analyze data in lots of cool ways!”
Passions and Hobbies
“I love reading! When I am not limited to textbooks, you can usually find me reading something about history, although my guilty pleasure is Agatha Christie novels,”
“I am interested in how geography and culture connect and interact, and particularly how they interacted in the past.”