I was born and grew up in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. It's one of those places which is a kind of paradise, with warm weather and beautiful beaches that I still miss. But it was also a place where I survived Hurricanes Hugo and Marilyn and felt limited by the lack of resources that are available in larger places.
I was a nerd. I loved reading and writing and math and computers. I participated in nerdy hobbies like quiz bowl and MathCounts, devoted myself to lengthy research projects, and racked up a large phone bill after discovering usenet.
I spent two summers at Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, an excellent math summer program, where I was introduced to yellow pigs. I highly recommend it for exceptional high school mathematicians.
With the exception of a few classes, I was bored in high school, so when I heard about Simon's Rock, a college which accepts students who have not yet completed high school, I applied. I got a scholarship and dropped out of high school after my sophomore year. Simon's Rock is a truly unique (and, we think, quite special) place, and I had a wonderful time there. I took excellent math classes, wrote lots of papers, discovered systems administration, and was genuinely challenged. Most importantly, I found a place where I really fit in and made lots of close friends who were interested in learning.
My sophmore year I installed Debian GNU/Linux, and was hooked on Linux and the potential of Open Source/Free Software. I began working for the school's computing department. That summer I wired up most of the campus with another student. Much of my last two years in college revolved around my nearly-fulltime job doing networking, tech support, and a bit of systems administration. Somehow I also managed to carry a heavy course load and spend time with my excellent housemates.
I spent six months my senior year working in IT departments at Stanford University. When not working, I wrote my undergraduate thesis, a mathematical story based very loosely on Alice in Wonderland.
After I graduated, I took a position working as the sole Systems Administrator at Simon's Rock, which turned out to be an excellent decision because it gave me the freedom to do everything from tech support and wiring and building computers to web design, DBA, and router configuration to making policy decisions and supervising student workers, all along with more traditional sysadmin tasks of course. I also taught a linux class.
After a year, I switched to working part-time and moved to Somerville (Boston) to pursue a masters in philosophy at Tufts University. I had a busy three semesters of classes, in addition to working (more than part-time), hanging out with my housemates and other nearby friends, and spending way too much time driving (in one direction) to work and (in another direction) to visit my boyfriend.
After finishing classes, I moved in with my boyfriend in Falmouth (Cape Cod), and switched back to working full-time (mostly remotely), while taking one more class and studying for and taking philosophy exams. In my free time I went to the beach, read a lot, and did a bit of programming. After I'd been living there for about a year, I got offered a job at WHOI to implement a network registration system, and after I finished that I worked on a few other things at the intersection of networking and system administration. In my free time, I juggled, gardened, edited Wikipedia, and visited nearby friends.
After three years in Cape Cod, my boyfriend and I both moved to Silicon Valley to start jobs at Google. The work and work environment were exceptionally stimulating, and I found California, with its warmer weather, swimming pools, year-round farmers' markets, and ample bookstores and universities, to be a very agreeable place to live.
While working, I maintained academic pretensions. I presented a paper on Virgin Islanders at a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. I returned to Hampshire College for the Yellow Pig Math Days. I attended history and philosophy of science talks at Stanford, and subsequently started attending philosophy and linguistics courses there as well. I took language classes through adult education programs. I attended the Linguistic Institute in Boulder. I read many books.
After nearly six years as a systems adminstrator (Site Reliability Engineer) at Google, I decided that, while Google had been an excellent place to work in many ways, it was no longer the place where I wanted to be. In the midst of the nymwars, I left and began pursuing linguistics full-time.
(Last updated Aug, 2011)