Prior to starting my corporate career, I attended the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a minor in French. In 1984, I spent a year studying in Paris (Sorbonne) and have been a life-long Francophile. My career was spent with the same firm, under a variety of different names (Hewitt Associates, Aon-Hewitt and Alight).
I worked in Employee Benefits & HR Business Outsourcing providing consulting and management support to several global S&P 500 clients. I lead teams to set up and deliver systems and administration services for 401(k) retirement plans and later payroll services, corporate health plans, and compensation plans.
Throughout my career, I gravitated to the role of (and was assigned to clients as the) “problem solver.”. I was akin to Winston Wolfe (played by Harvey Keitel) in the movie Pulp Fiction. As “the cleaner,” I gathered the facts, collaborated with my team, and got the plan in motion. And, in the process, cleaned up the mess. Client relationships and employee relations get ugly when an implementation or a paycheck error isn’t quickly addressed and fixed.
I met my husband of 24 years, Peter, on a bicycle club ride in 1996. It was a Halloween ride that started on Shades of Death Road in New Jersey. (This is not a joke.) We started dating and realized that we both loved bicycling as well as cross-country skiing. We took up fly fishing together, which has taken us on many adventures, like fishing with an indigenous family on the tundra in northern Alaska, steelhead fishing in British Columbia and trout fishing in Montana. The rest, as they say, is history.
After over 30 years with my nose to the corporate grindstone, my nose was getting worn out as well as my enthusiasm for corporate life. Peter was feeling the same way, and we decided it was time to concentrate on doing what we loved most: Nordic skiing, bicycling, fly fishing, gardening and birding. We left suburbia in New Jersey and moved to Bozeman, Montana. It was like being thrown into the deep end of the pool in freezing water—in a good, invigorating way. Bozeman is an outdoor paradise as well as being a university town (Montana State University). Bozeman ticked off all of our outdoor boxes as well as being a cultural center for southwest Montana—really! While I enjoyed my career working in data and logic (and still do), what does it mean if you can’t connect it meaningfully to culture and how we live or want to live? I’m grateful for my lengthy career with the same firm and our retired life in Bozeman.