I freelanced for a while mostly to pay the bills so I could focus on other aspects of my life. These were some highlights from that era:

• I worked with Anglemap as a service design researcher, tackling problems like "why don't women want to stay at this company?" and "how do we give leaders the skills they need to succeed at this company?" with Maersk

• I worked with Pencil & Paper as a product designer, doing 0 - 1 prototype design for a physio app that uses computer vision to helped to unlock business model decisions and product strategy decisions

• I worked with Canada's Forest Trust as a the lead product designer to bring a concept that had all its inputs in place to life, creating the visual identity and MVP for a forest carbon capture platform

• Along the way, I also got to do some web3 design, research for The Nearness, and the UN

Even as a freelancer, I was able to lead and bring confidence to those working with me. I place a lot of care and thought into both the tasks at hand and what I can do to push the strategy forward.

My Maersk stakeholder said: "you hold space for the team to dream" - which will become one of the defining pillars of my work.

I joined a founding product team as one of two first full time design hires. Alongside my deeply thoughtful and more visual counterpart Chelsea Hwang, and our product leader Amanda Pardy, we took on the task of starting product at a previously engineering and sales focused team. We had to bring user centred design and beautiful interactions to an application that was basically a proof of concept.

We faced tech debt, we faced difficult changes in direction, we faced a lot of turnover on all teams (all typical, I learned, for this phase of start up). These years were the steepest climb of my career, and looking back I can't believe how much we did.

• Chelsea and I got to define all the design infrastructure. She used research to connect it with a new visual identity, listening to hours and hours of customer interviews.

• I got to lay the foundation for how research was done and operationalized in design. We got to do every conceivable type of research, interviewing stakeholders from across the ecosystem. This enabled us to hold an intuition about the user's experience in the micro (informing UX flows) and the macro (informing product strategy)

• Sonya Noronha (Product Marketing Manager) and I got to run 4 weeks of design thinking sprints to find new product directions. We got to pull 5 cross-functional team members off of their day jobs for 4 weeks. I still can't believe we were empowered to do this. Through this, different teams got the collaboration chops to work through problems together.

• Amber Foucault (Director of Product) and I worked through a really really tough moment; the product team was burnt the eff out from turnover and lack of leadership. We doubted her at every turn when she started with us. She experienced high turnover and in that time, Sensibill had its first round of lay offs post pandemic. She chipped away at me, bringing in important product team members from other legs of her career, and laid the path for me to finally ship something real.

• I had the immense privilege of working with a full stack team - UX Designer, UI Designer, Design Systems Designer, UX Writer, PM, Tech (too many for me to name) - to rebuild the Sensibill application in Web and Mobile. I held the strategy based on the years of research and prototyping I've been doing (we shipped very little before this due to issues with technology). And after 6 months - we shipped the thing!!! A whole thing!!! Look at it! There was intention in every crevice from the information architecture to the tech stack.

My co-workers and I are still friends now. We tinker together, we make magic, we make jokes, and we reminisce about the time we got the spend in the office together that was about so much more than whatever product we were trying to make for our leadership.

Klick gave me an opportunity to start my UX career. While I had the intuition and skill to design, I didn't have the working experience and the real world context to ground me. So there, I took these theoretical ideas of how reframing problems to practice by figuring out where the "next" button should appear on a page.

This was a really fun time in my life, even though I was working through the painful act of returning from my galavanting in the sun. I missed water. I was experiencing grief. And the rain in Toronto that summer was incessant. I guess I brought the water back with me in a way I wasn't intending to.

I got to work on design systems, I got to help my manager manage me, I got to work through my own ego, I got to lead the design and facilitation of workshops, I got to conceptualize campaigns into experiences, I got to support my creative colleagues, and I got to bring teams together.

My primary job was writing case studies for the agency to submit to award shows. In this job I got all my storytelling chops. I especially loved doing portraits of co-workers for people related award nominations. In this time I helped our President Lori Grant and our Event Manager Sarah Jacobs Barrs win awards and threw surprise parties that involved tears and that was probably the highlight of this leg of my career.

Along the way because of luck and my willingness to contribute I got to do:

• Event Management

• Social Media

• Project Management (ofc, lol)

• Town Halls

• You get the idea, I was brought along for a lot of things!

This was my first sabbatical after burning out at my first job. It wasn't so much that the job was so demanding in terms of hours, it's just an idealist out there in the world, being disappointed by real life even though things weren't that bad or hard.

I went to WWOOF in Hana for a few months with the intention of learning about food systems. What I came back with was a true appreciation for my body, for the land, for rising and setting with the sun, and for the community of volunteers I spent all my days with. This was where I plunged into river water, where I learned my own patch of the ocean, and where I learned how my body could feel when it's tethered to the ground.

This was an act of remembering: remembering my father's childhood. We have always had vegetables growing in the backyard but now I am ready to take that over and to grow it in my own way.

In these years, I learned how rich people think about money (as a game). I was good at it btw, Dean's List every year for writing equations that some random man made up to enforce his world view like a bajillion years ago.

I sat alongside those with a fighting spirit for the world, those who would later go on to become fashion designers and entrepreneurs, and others who felt that cures to diseases shouldn't be shared with poor people.

I loved loved loved my electives: environmental psychology, behavioural economics, media psych, astronomy, physics - I do have an academic love and a fierce curiosity that school is apt for.