Utah Business For my fifth birthday, my grandmother gave me a hardcover book called
The Sea. This single gift determined the direction for the rest of my life.
The images in that book came to life in my mind as I imagined being underwater with them. Some were magical and inviting like the colorful fish, sea stars, and octopus. Some were frightening like the sharks and giant squid. The hours I spent looking at the pictures in that book turned into years of fascination with the underwater world.
One of the pictures showed a scuba diver and I asked my dad what his job was. A marine biologist was the answer, and so that’s when I decided what I would become. That idea became all the more real when “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” began to air on television every Sunday afternoon. From then on, whenever adults would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up―I said I wanted to be a marine biologist.