After high school I started college. I worked part time for my father’s business and went to school. When my parents divorced, my father and I had a splitting of the ways.

At that point I left and needed a job. So I went to work for Pacific Bell. Then the opportunity to move to Santa Cruz came along and I knew I needed a change in my life. So I moved down here.

First I worked for the phone company in Monterey, then they closed that down and I moved to Santa Clara and they closed that down. My sister was looking for a part-time employee. I went from part-time employee to full-time employee to general manager at her company. I did that for ten years. That was a carpet, upholstery, mini-blind cleaning company. I realized that with the time and effort I was putting in and the amount of money I was making, there was a real disconnect there. So I decided it was time to move on.

At that point I went back to school at Cabrillo college. I thought I wanted to be a physician’s assistant. I had to put hours in at the hospital and I was volunteering at Dominican.

I ended up getting into San Jose State’s nursing school. I was working a point-9, which was not conducive to going to nursing school. I also found while going to nursing school that being a nurse wasn’t what I wanted to do even to get to the endpoint of being a physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner. It was the nursing school experience and the doctors that we had to deal with. They treated us like children.

So I got a degree in business and communications. I have a public relations and marketing degree. I took that and I worked for Pitney Bowes for exactly one year.

Then I got this job in the pharmaceutical industry. The funny thing is that running in the back of my mind the whole time, even working at Dominican. I used to see sales reps and thinking “I could do that, and I could do that better than they could.”

I just have a way of looking at a situation and grasping what could be done better. When I was in college I had to find an internship and I found one with California Alliance for Pride and Equality, the largest gay non-profit organization in the state. They actually asked me at the end of my internship to join the board of directors. I did that for two years and then I decided that it wasn’t a good fit. So I moved on.