Motivation
I did my undergrad at California State University, Chico. I studied ecology and learned a lot of natural history. I did pretty well with my grades, but not great. What I really needed was someone to push me and encourage me. One professor, Rob Schlising, was great. He was soft spoken, and payed very close attention to detail in all things. He was an amazing teacher to boot. Outside of class we collaborated on a number of papers dealing with basic biology of some plants and their pollinators. I’m sure it was his generosity and encouragement that motivated me to move on to graduate school.
Demotivation
Graduate school was a landscape of ups and downs, emotional highs and lows. Essential to moving on to a faculty position, what I thought I wanted for some time, is getting funding. I had no luck at all in graduate school — none. This, in addition to other things, turned me to thinking about how I could do science without all the money needed for field work. One option was learning to program to be able to use data already collected to answer interesting questions. I started to learn R now about 8 years ago, and have loved programming ever since. So as demoralizing as it was to realize that I couldn’t cut it in academia, the ability to know how to work a computer gives me hope for the future.