My career has been shaped by exploring and building connections between design, business, higher education and philanthropy.
A Registered Architect with over twenty years of experience, my passion for design began with creating places for learning and has led to a career designing facilities for higher education. But even in college, I was equally passionate about business, professional practice and marketing. So, throughout my career, I also sought out marketing positions in the A/E field and eventually earned an MBA from the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University (Go Panthers!). Along the way, I had the opportunity to explore the not-for-profit world, becoming a professional fundraiser, active volunteer and skilled board member.
While seemingly different, all these career opportunities shared the need for creative problem solving – a skill that I honed as an architecture student at RPI (Go Engineers!). In the past decade, the rest of the world has also come to understand the value of critical thinking through problem-based learning and design thinking (that’s basically architecture school in a nutshell) and we are creating PBL classrooms to support STE(A)M education and signing up for courses at Stanford’s D-School (which is like architecture studio for business people).
Today, I have given up leading architecture projects to design business strategies and build marketing programs for a global design firm – but, I still keep the practice passion alive as a member of the firm-wide higher ed practice council. Outside of work, I volunteer my time and talents to work with organizations that create educational opportunities for students and have a mission to positively shape the future of education.