I grew up in Southern California with a family of lifetime Sierra Clubbers.  Our school vacations and summers were spent camping in California’s stunning national parks and other wild areas.  I have vivid memories of driving our 1959 Ricky-Ticky-adorned Ford Country Wagon on dirt roads (where it definitely didn’t belong) in search of campgrounds.  As a teenager I began backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains and gained a reverence for its rugged granite, meadows replete with streams and wildflowers, and glacier-fed turquoise lakes. 

As an undergraduate at Harvard, I studied Social Studies, an honors, interdisciplinary concentration that was based in classical social theory.  I selected this major because I had a deep interest in the power that social and institutional forces exert on the individual, rather than simply what goes on within the individual psyche, as though it could be free of context. 

In my junior year, I co-founded a peer counseling and outreach group, Project ECHO, which still serves the campus in much the same form almost 40 years later.  I experienced directly the rewards of helping others heal. Thankfully, it also helped me know what to do with myself when I acknowledged that my planned career path in environmental or women's-rights law would work against, rather than honor, my temperament.  I graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, also receiving a Presidential Commendation for my contribution to the student body’s wellbeing.