Amber Andregg grew up dancing, but when an illness in high school forced her to quit, she had to find a new passion. Her objective: find a job where she "could help and serve others but also make a living." She found that in an Introduction to Personal Finance course in college. Today she's a wealth advisor who tells us, "I love my job so I really spend a lot of time doing it."

Rachel Barry's parents taught her to "be flexible and be open." From teaching web design, to parlaying her love of crafting into a magazine job, Rachel says that, "Curiosity and communication are basically the things that rule my life." Today, she uses those skills to let people know about all the awesome scientific work being done on the International Space Station.

Chef Abra Berens got her start cooking at Ann Arbor's legendary Zingerman's Deli during college. After cooking school in Ireland on a working farm, she returned to the Midwest, cooking, baking, and then starting her own farm with a focus on. Today, Abra is the executive chef of Stock Cafe where she cooks Midwestern food that highlights the culinary traditions of the region.

Allison Bhatta is the senior art director at an advertising agency, where she uses her design skills to solve client problems. She talked to us about her "compulsive maker ways," her practical approach to figuring out what to do with her life, going from full-time work to freelance and back again, and how earning "half a master's" degree put her on her way in the advertising world.

Rachel Bowman was driving a boat for an avid scuba diver in the Florida Keys when she saw him coming up with fish like nothing she'd ever seen: lionfish. Rachel became scuba-certified, got in the water, and became the Lionfish Huntress. Today she dives off her boat, the Britney Spears and hunts lionfish commercially, selling them to restaurants and grocery stores, and collaborating with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to gather data and raise awareness about this invasive species and healthy and sustainable seafood.

Jennifer Brandel was "an intensely curious kid," and that curiosity has been her guiding principle all her life. After a post-college internship with NPR, Jennifer says her 20s were "a total hodgepodge of trial and error," freelancing as a writer among other things, including pitching stories to WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station. That led to her developing a show "Curious City" that asked the public what stories from their communities they wanted told. Jennifer took that idea and founded Hearken, a company that "helps newsrooms listen to the public before they publish" through consultancy and a tech toolset.

Teresa Brazen grew up loving art and feeling confident in her ability to create. After working for several years as a visual artist, she decided to look for a new kind of work where she could continue to be creative. That led her to user experience design. Today, she leads professional education at Cooper and tells us, "Creativity is something that you can bring into any kind of work, and in a large part it’s really up to you to do that."

Janelle Bynum is already on her third career. A childhood interest in engineering led to a college scholarship to study electrical engineering. After working at GM and getting an MBA, Janelle switched gears and moved to Oregon to run four McDonald's restaurants with her husband. Janelle was inspired to run for state representative by her passion for quality education, where she now represents metropolitan Portland. Her advice to anyone running for office? "Know your why."

Monica Byrne wanted to be the first person to set foot on another planet. Then, she realized that she'd rather stay here on Earth, imagining a different world as a science fiction writer. She tells us why she believes that science fiction is an activist platform, and how her low tolerance for unhappiness makes her more inventive in making a living as a writer.

Amy Chu writes comics like Deadpool, Poison Ivy, and Red Sonja, but that hasn't always been her job. She's also started a magazine for the Asian-American community, consulted for non-profits, biotechnology companies, and pharmaceutical companies, and run the Macau tourism bureau in Hong Kong. Amy talked to us about following an unconventional career path, drawing on her past experiences as a comic book writer, and how she knows she's found her passion.

As Co-CEO of Cooper for the past 25 years, Sue Cooper has worn many hats, but as Cooper has grown, she's shed most of them to focus on what she really loves: building a strong and supportive culture so that Cooper can make technology easier to use. Sue talked with us about how she's built a company with heart, how she and her husband, Alan Cooper, pioneered user experience design as a field, and how "culture is something that’s created by each individual." 

Growing up, Lizy Dastin wanted to be a teacher and an author. Today, she teaches art history, and is still a storyteller. Lizy doesn't tell stories by writing fiction, like she did as a teenager, though. She shares the stories of street art and street artists in Los Angeles through her business, Art and Seeking.

In high school, Lisa Dietz was voted "Most Likely to Become an Anthropologist." She's spent her career working in international development, in Washington, DC and abroad. She tells us about growing up a triplet, a "transformative" trip to Ecuador in high school, and how there are many paths to work in international development.

When she was 11, Breanna DiGiammarino danced in the Nutcracker with the Joffrey Ballet. Later she used her passion for dance as a benchmark for any interest she was pursuing, and asked herself four questions: Is it something I enjoy? Am I good at it? Am I learning while I do it? And is it changing the world for the better? Does her job as the Senior Director of Social Innovation at crowd-funding platform Indiegogo meet those criteria? “Definitely.”

Like most people, Caroline Gaynor has a day job, working as a regional director for a large asset manager. Outside of her job, though, Caroline works hard at something that isn't a job but is more than a hobby: guiding visually-impaired triathletes. A triathlete since her college years, Caroline got into guiding by chance in 2008 and was hooked. Throughout several years of professional ups and downs, "guiding was the one constant thing in my life when things weren’t going super well professionally," and in fact, she found her current job with a company she loves through someone she met at a bike race! 

Emily Graslie, creator of the Brain Scoop, grew up in South Dakota having adventures in the outdoors.  A visit to her college’s museum with a friend her senior year in art school changed her life. Her enthusiasm for the museum led to her own youtube channel, The Brain Scoop, which caught the eye of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. They hired Emily to be their Chief Curiosity Correspondent, a position created just for her, and she’s been sharing their amazing collections ever since.

Merin Guthrie grew up sketching dresses in the margins of her notebooks whenever she got bored in class, but never considered a career in design. After years in the non-profit world, where organizations are driven by how best to serve a community, she realized that women were not being well-served by the fashion industry. Her company, Kit, dresses busy women by making clothes "just as awesome as they are."

Jenea Hayes fell in love with cognitive psychology in college, but her interest in technology started even earlier, when she'd take apart (and put back together) her family Mac II in grade school. She got her start as a professional communicator with a high school job at San Francisco's Exploratorium. At Cooper, her's combined those skills as an interaction designer, someone who "uses her obsession for what makes people tick to synthesize key details while keeping the whole system in mind."

Stephanie Jass is a history professor, 7 time Jeopardy! champion, and cabaret performer. She tells us about the fun of being a mathlete and an athlete, how she fell in love with history, and asking for what you want.

Wendy Land-Carillo has spent the past three decades working in the trading industry, starting out filing and photocopying for $170 a week, and now as a floor broker and liaison to upstairs clients for floor execution. Along the way, she owned her own business for 18 years, which she calls "the best thing I ever did." Wendy talked to us about learning on the job, the importance of her professional relationships, and how she went from studying art to the trading world.

Melissa Leifer has lived in New York City since she started college at NYU and has been a real estate agent there for the past fifteen years. She talked to us about how people skills got her into the field, how her acting background makes her better at her job, how she's been building her own business while she's built her own skills as a negotiator and salesperson, and how it's "an honor" to be part of a major decision in people's lives.

Tracy Leskey is an entomologist: a scientist who studies bugs. She's loved insects since she was a little girl with a Golden Book on monarch butterflies. Tracy combined her love of nature with a love of biology, and today is a researcher for the US Department of Agriculture. She works to protect food growers from invasive insects like the brown marmorated stink bug by finding sustainable, ecologically sound solutions.

When Keri Lockett was growing up, she says that "sports were always an integral part of who I was." Keri was recruited to play Division 1 softball. After working at ESPN and the Big Ten Network, Keri now works for Pepsi, running their Player of the Year program for high school. She applied her drive and work ethic to academics and work, building relationships, and finding a way to do work she really cares about.

Maree Martinez fell in love with Shakespeare at ten, then thought she might be a historical consultant on films, before deciding to leave her PhD program at Cambridge because what she really wanted to do was teach. After teaching history at a middle school, she moved with her family to Toronto, where she noticed signs of the city's film production as she explored with her son. She wondered who taught the kids on those sets, and soon enough, she was. 

Children’s book editor and writer Wendy McClure tells us about what first made her feel like a writer, studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, how she picks manuscripts, and writing a book about all the Little House on the Prairie home sites.

Today, Shannon McGarity is Director of User Experience at Cooper, a user experience design and strategy firm. Her job that lets her be both a coach and a player, managing people and teaching classes and designing client solutions. Shannon's education in interactive telecommunications in the mid-90s gave her the tools she needed to jump into creating “work that people might use and see on the web.”

Art history professor Beth Merfish always loved biographies and visual learning and found a way to combine them in the visual language of art. She tells us how summer camp was a chance to try one a new self, how she uses political activism to give everyone a voice, and how exciting it was when she got her PhD and her professors became her peers.

Artist Colette Miller has always embraced her creative energy, from making puppets and putting on plays as a kid, , to training as a painter in college, to writing poetry and songs as a musician in Virginia, New York, and South Africa. She was inspired to create her angel wing paintings while driving on the LA freeway, and thinking about what she would want to see from there.  Colette's wings now span the globe, sharing her message that "we can be the good of this earth and we can be the angels of this earth."

High school astronomy teacher Danielle Miller always knew she wanted to be a teacher, and always loved space- she went to space camp as a teenager and an adult.  Today, she brings space alive in the classroom through a focus on current events and “learning together,” and constantly looks for ways to get hands-on experience with robotics, NASA, and astronomy.

Filmmaker Cynthia Moses grew up in Central Massachusetts, where she thought life would bring a husband, kids, and a white picket fence. Then, she joined the Peace Corps in the early 1970s and left that life behind. After stints at ABC and 60 Minutes, Cynthia took a job with National Geographic’s wildlife documentary unit, and became fascinated with chimpanzees, gorillas. Several years filming in their native habitats in Central Africa led Cynthia to start INCEF, which makes films by and for local people to communicate ideas at the intersections of education, public health, and conservation. Cynthia and her team have reached over a million people over the past ten years, and today, Cynthia is focused on creating foundations for INCEF’s work to continue long into the future.

Rani Peffer's zest for life shines through, whether she's talking about how she has "quite possibly the coolest job in the world," her two "extremely cool" kids, taking banjo lessons, or playing to win on Jeopardy! Rani talked to us about growing up in rural Kentucky, competing in the National Spelling Bee, and doing what she loves whether or not it's cool. 

Amanda Peters has always been interested in learning about other people and making a positive impact on the world. After studying anthropology in college, her career took some twists and turns before she discovered the world of career counseling. Today, Amanda helps students at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard "find connections between the impact that they want to make, the skills and experiences that they bring from elsewhere from before they came here, and the skills and experiences they want to get or they are getting here at the school."

 “Born and bred” Chicagoan Kelly Suzanne Saulsberry now works for the City as the Director of Policy and Outreach at the Chicago Commission on Human Relations. She tells us about the roots of her passion for civic engagement and social justice, crises of confidence, investing in herself, and that she’d tell her teenage self, “Girl, you’re all right.”

For the past seven years, Allison Lami Sawyer has been the CEO of  Rebellion Photonics, which makes hyperspectral video cameras to detect leaks at oil and gas fields and refineries. Allison talked with us about how her role as CEO has evolved as Rebellion photonics has grown, how her physics and engineering background have been critical to her success as a tech CEO, and that "the hardest part of starting my own company was finding the starting line."

Ashley Shapiro says she was "very confident and very competitive" growing and that she hasn't changed. Today, she's the sponsorship director for the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, securing $5 million in sponsorships from 150 companies, to benefit Florida International University. She also oversees ticketing for the 65 thousand Festival attendees- the largest event in Miami outside of the Super Bowl. Between work and her family, Ashley tells us, "I have a very fulfilled life."

After an intro computer science class in high school, Shae Smith fell in love with programming. After graduating from Smith with a computer science degree, she "hopped around" to several jobs before landing at DoSomething.org. Today, she works to make their platform better and is involved with several organizations supporting youth in New York City. 

Jaime Swartz was a competitive kid, in school and on the volleyball court. She went on to major in applied math at Northwestern. At a college career fair, Jaime read a trading job description and says that, "every single bullet point was a description of me." Being a trader lets her be competitive and use math, and draw on her background as an athlete. And she's still an avid volleyball player.

Growing up, architect Ming Thompson spent hours making craft projects. When she got to college, a class on structural physics in architecture connected the dots between her love of making things with a profession dedicated to doing just that. Today she and a partner run their own architecture and design firm, where they design physical spaces, graphics, and anything in-between- while they design the business and life they want. As Ming tells us, “If I can be in a position where I’m making things or designing things I’m pretty happy.” 

Growing up in the Midwest, Meg McClure Tynan envisioned herself living a glamorous city life. Ever since her first trip to Europe at 18, she was “single-mindedly focused on getting back whichever way possible.” Today she lives in London, sings her way across Europe, and experiences "that euphoria that people get when they come abroad for the first time over, and over, and over again."

“Sister of the soil and a tender of the table” Amy Wallner tells us about urban farming, getting the community involved in how vegetables are grown, and the changing seasons keep her excited about her work.

Amanda Watson grew up wanting to wanting to leave Mississippi behind. After majoring in music education and graduating from law school (and teaching all the while), she realized that she really enjoyed research and fact-finding. Thinking back to a student job at the Ole Miss law library, she became a law librarian. Today, she happily lives with her son and her partner in New Orleans as the Associate Director of the Tulane University School of Law Library.

Fran Watson traces her start as an activist to a 2011 climbing accident that left her with two broken legs. But, she's spent her life looking out for people who need support, starting with her own family. Fran started her own law practice to protect clients with same-sex partners with will, trusts, and probate in the days before same-sex marriage. With the support of her wife and her church, Fran is a tireless advocate for the Houston LGBT community.

Recently, Maia Weinstock's Women of NASA LEGO minifigures set has gotten a lot of attention, but it's just one element of Maia's commitment to raising the profile of women in STEM. She's spent her career as a science communicator. For Maia, science communication "is a great career if you have many interests, because you don't necessarily have to just pick one."

Growing up, Julie Wolfson had a knack for taking things apart and putting them back together. Today, she works as a systems engineer on the Orion spacecraft for Lockheed Martin, identifying, assessing and addressing risk in Orion's software systems and managing an Agile project team. A Memphis native, Julie loves knowing she'll get to say "That's my spaceship!" when Orion takes people into space. 

In high school,  supply chain manager Zarina Zayas-Ortiz was fascinated by the physics of roller coasters. She tells us how she uses the language of science and technology, following the "stronger yes" in decision making, and how supply chain is the circulatory system of a business.