I found Northland through a book in my guidance counselor’s office that listed majors and the in-state schools that offered them. For meteorology, this list was limited to three options: the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Northland. As I hadn’t heard about Northland until that day, I went home and researched it. What I found was my perfect school on paper: small class sizes, small-but-close campus community, and sustainably minded. When I went on my campus tour I was hooked, and my presidential scholarship reeled me in.
I still look back at my time at Northland as some of my fondest memories. Some of my favorite experiences were my Mesoscale Meteorology May Term course, where we spent a week storm chasing in the plains; Broadcast Practicum, a winter course that brought us to Duluth every Sunday to practice weather broadcasting at KBJR/KDLH (even though I eventually learned broadcasting wasn’t for me!); and our Weather Club-fundraised/Parsonage-funded club trip to the American Meteorological Society’s annual conference in Seattle in 2017. What really set me on my career path, though, was a mix of all the complicated dynamic meteorology courses with math that made you want to rip your hair out (but I’m a masochist in that way) and the computer science course I took junior year with Dr. Kim where I discovered I actually really liked programming. Every project in that class was like solving a puzzle, and if you can get the pieces to fit just right, you have a fully-functioning program.
After I graduated, I got a job as a software engineer developing weather applications/viewers for the Air Force, and now I help create weather data utilizing proprietary meteorological algorithms for the insurance industry. Every experience up until this point has led me to be successful where I am today and to love what I do, and I have Northland to thank for that. It’s important that we fight for these small, tight-knit schools to stay open so that other students can similarly find their passions without the fear of having to attend a large university and getting lost in the crowd.