I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a Virgo, the middle of five, and curious about pretty much everything.

I tried every sport under the sun before soccer and track stuck. I liked to move, compete, see how far I could push myself. But when I wasn’t running around, I was usually somewhere quiet, completely lost in a charcoal drawing.

Long before I knew what a creative career was, I knew I loved making things.

In 2017, I headed to Bucknell University to compete in Division I Track & Field. I knew I wanted to run. What I wanted to study was a much bigger question.

Then, during my first semester, I took a seminar called Virtual Worlds and got my first real look at advertising. Not just the ads themselves, but everything happening underneath them: gender, politics, culture, language, imagery, and the power all of it has to shape the way we see something.

That sent me down a rabbit hole.

I took psychology, sociology, politics, Anthropology, Women’s & Gender Studies, and just about anything else that might help me understand why people think the way they do. Eventually, Medical Anthropology gave that curiosity a home, and I declared Anthropology alongside Women’s & Gender Studies.

I had found what I wanted to study. I still hadn't figured out what I wanted to do.

But if there was a clue, it was probably in how I chose to spend my time outside the classroom.

I became a Brand Marketing & Social Media Intern for Bucknell Student Health, where I spent three years creating campaigns, designing graphics and eventually redesigning their logo. It brought me back to something I had loved long before I ever opened a textbook on Anthropology: making things.

Only now, I wasn't drawing alone for the sake of drawing. I was learning that something I made could communicate an idea, catch someone's attention, and change the way information was understood.

By graduation, I had two majors and far more questions than answers about what came next.

I knew I wanted creativity to be part of it. I just didn't have the training, the vocabulary, or even a clear picture of what a creative career looked like.

I had never met an Art Director. Honestly, I didn't know what that title meant.

But I knew advertising. And I knew what I was already good at.

So I started there.

LEARN. RUN. CREATE.

My first job was at The Scienomics Group, a medical communications agency within Omnicom.

It made sense. Advertising met healthcare, bringing me back to the medical anthropology that had first captured my attention at Bucknell and the health communications work I already knew I enjoyed.

And I was good at it.

I learned account management and project management from the ground up. ISI. Fair balance. Veeva. Fact-checking. Budgets. Timelines. Reviews. Approvals. I learned how to bring different disciplines together, how to keep a project moving and how much has to happen behind the scenes before an idea ever makes it out into the world.

But I still wasn't making much.

So I started making things elsewhere.

In 2023, I began creating fashion and skincare content for Lemon8 on the side. I photographed. I filmed. I designed. I wrote copy. They were small assignments, but they gave me something my day job wasn't giving me.

The itch came back.

And the more I scratched it, the itchier it got.

I knew my next move had to get me closer to the work, which brought me to McKinney.

And then everything clicked.

For the first time, I was inside a true creative agency. I sat in rooms with art directors, copywriters, designers and Creative Directors. I watched half-formed thoughts turn into concepts, concepts turn into campaigns and scribbles on a page become work people would actually see.

And I couldn't stop watching.

The words. The typography. The symbols. The colors. The strange little connections that suddenly became BIG ideas.

I had spent years getting closer and closer to the creative without realizing there was an actual job on the other side of that instinct.

Now I was looking right at it.

And eventually, I had to admit something to myself:

I didn't want to be close to the work anymore.
I wanted to make it.

So I did something about it.

I enrolled at Parsons School of Design at The New School and started building the technical skills I had spent years convincing myself I didn't have.

Now my days and nights look a little different.

By day, I'm still at McKinney, managing teams and helping ideas make their way into the world. By night, I'm learning how to make those ideas myself.

I'm designing. Illustrating. Concepting. Experimenting. Making things that work. Making things that don't. Developing my eye and finding my own creative point of view.

And strangely enough, none of this feels like starting over.

The Anthropology taught me to observe.

Account management taught me how ideas become real.

Years inside advertising taught me what makes work work.

And somewhere underneath all of it is still the kid from Scranton who could sit alone for hours with a piece of charcoal and completely lose track of time.

It took me a while to find my way back to her.

But this time, I know what to call it.

I'm becoming a Creative Director.