In the realm of singing painting paleontology, life is a winding road. Your advocation and your vocation must be able to change at will. Mine has traditionally jumped from science to art and back again. One always needs to be learning as well – never stop learning. Each situation you’re in, you have to tell yourself, “even though it’s hard, is there something I can learn of value here?” So often I have been able to utilize a skill that, at the time I was learning it, didn’t think it was important.

Take art, for example. From the start, I wanted to become a paleontologist, and my parents encouraged me – not because it’s a high-income job, but because if you love something, you’re more apt to work hard to succeed in it. Paleontology is a science, and so I was encouraged to take math-heavy classes like chemistry and algebra. However, in high school, my worst classes were math, so I decided to pursue a subject in college that was less math-intensive, but that I loved as well –art. I learned figure drawing and design, performance art and sculpture.

It’s interesting to note that sometimes you can’t escape a lesson you’re supposed to learn, and even if you avoid it, it comes back to haunt you. When I moved to California as a designer (after my art degree), I began finding fossils in the hills near my apartment, and became interested in science again. I met a paleontologist at UCLA who needed an artist to help illustrate a newly discovered fossil. I just so happened to be an illustrator looking for a fossil to draw!

Because of my skills, I was accepted into the paleontology program at UCLA. Had I not developed my art, I probably wouldn’t have been accepted, because my math grades weren’t stellar. Still, one of my first classes at UCLA – “Fluid Mechanics of Living Systems” – was math! This time, though, I struggled through it, because on the other side was my dream – to be a paleontologist!