I am a first year student in the Clinical/Community program. I'm about as fully Illinoisan as one can be. I was born in Hinsdale, IL and grew up in Naperville before attending undergrad at Northern Illinois University. There, I graduated with degrees in secondary social studies education and psychology. I briefly worked as a high school teacher before switching careers into doing research in clinical neuroscience. After teaching, I worked under Dr. Laurie Wakschlag in the Developmental Mechanisms lab at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine in downtown Chicago before finally settling here in Urbana-Champaign for graduate school.