I got involved in transit directly after completing my undergraduate degree. My degrees were in communications and geography, and geography is where I really fell into transit. I did a lot of projects, including a senior capstone project looking at the CTA. I really enjoyed transit and had a lot of peers that did as well, so I saw it as a viable career path. After undergrad, as I was looking around for my first job, I ended up moving further from where I grew up—to Louisville, Kentucky. An opportunity came up there for a transit planning job, that’s where I started my career and haven't looked back since. The most rewarding part about the job for me is the impact, especially in planning, that you can make with the service, engaging with riders outreach, ensuring equity in the service, working towards sustainable transit, decreasing cars on the road, and bringing multimodal solutions to our communities. Over my 5 years of working in transit, I’m most drawn to the variety of projects and the community of people I get to work with. Especially being in a smaller agency, even though I’m a planner, I still get to work on diverse projects. For example, I was able to do the agency’s first sustainability plan, which was a good challenge and learning opportunity. It set a roadmap for the agency. Transit is kind of a big industry, but it feels really small when you see a lot of familiar faces at conferences like APTA and others. That’s what keeps me here.
