My passion was and has always been weather. I always knew I wanted to be a meteorologist, but I didn''t know what I wanted to do with my degree. During my junior year in college, I started to receive more pressure about choosing what to do with my degree. I always thought I would work at a local National Weather Service office or try to get a job at the Storm Prediction Center, where some of the biggest weather challenges live. But when I toured our local NWS office in college, I learned you had to work shifting hours, meaning your hours changed every week. One week you''d be working early mornings, the next week would be afternoons to evenings, the final week was the graveyard shift, and then back to early mornings. Growing up in a household where my dad worked graveyard shifts for about ten years of my life, I am very much against them now. Although I understand the need for graveyard shifts and their importance, I didn''t want that kind of toll on my body.

I knew myself well enough that I understood graveyard shifts would be a very bad thing for me. I''ve struggled with sleep issues since I was a child and didn''t want to put my body and health through years of that. My thought back then was, "I would rather be on the same bad schedule every week, rather than have it change all the time." It''s all the more power to those strong and dedicated meteorologists who power through and make it happen every week! When I started at the University of North Dakota, my wonderful and wise advisor suggested I join the group of students who dabbled in the broadcast world by creating "UND Weather Updates." It was a simple, to-the-point club where meteorology majors and weather nerds got together to film short weather updates on campus and post them to YouTube. We had a very good set-up, considering our meteorology program was more known for research meteorologists and not broadcasters. We used one of the main weather graphics systems called Baron Lynx and had a whole set area with a blue screen. At this point in my life, I had zero interest in becoming a broadcast meteorologist.

Broadcast was far from a career option for me. Even then, I knew what the stereotype was for being a woman in the broadcast industry. I did not want to be objectified, ridiculed for every little thing, and called a "weather girl," a term that rose in popularity in the 1950s when women were hired in television more for entertainment value than meteorological expertise. I was in school to become a degreed meteorologist and wanted to have my proper title recognized. After talking with my advisor for a long time, he convinced me to do Weather Update for a semester. He said they really needed a producer on the morning show, and they were pretty desperate. I felt bad and reluctantly joined. The morning show was at 7:00 a.

m. one day per week. As someone who''s very much not a morning person, this was not a great time for me. I was frequently late by a few minutes in the mornings and dragged my feet into the building bright and early. Since I was just starting out at Weather Update, I was primarily shadowing the process: where to go to make the graphics, how to make them from scratch, which sites my colleagues used to make their own forecasts (this was particularly helpful for me), where the studio was, how to turn the lights on, how to adjust the camera, what to do for the microphones before we could use them, and how to record each video we made, along with other necessary steps. This was an organization entirely run by students. We were the designers, producers, broadcasters, and editors. If something went wrong in the studio, we had to do our best to troubleshoot the issue.

Ultimately, I met some great friends and made connections with meteorology majors in other grades. I looked up to some of my colleagues and knew I had so much to learn from them. We had a fun time for the majority of it, despite the early mornings. I continued doing Weather Updates for the rest of my time at UND and eventually got in front of the camera--with a big nudge from my colleague who was the main broadcaster of our show at that time. He would tell me, "You''re never going to get better at it if you don''t practice it, Caitlin." And I would respond with, "Well, I don''t want to do this with my life, so why would I need to practice it?" Even if I didn''t surprise myself by getting into the broadcast industry, practicing in front of the camera was a great experience. It allowed me to exercise both of my degrees: Atmospheric Sciences and Communication. It was kind of like working on public speaking, which I became very good at--with practice, of course.

After being a part of Weather Update and having more fun with it than I thought I would, I discovered that I found something I really liked doing, and I thought I was good at it.