Moments that changed my career path

Recently at Bayer there has been a lot of discussion about a "squiggly" career path vs a career ladder. When I graduated from high school - now 30 years ago in 1995, my original plan wasn't plant breeding. I didn't even know this was a job. I imagined becoming a violinist or maybe teaching biology or chemistry. What opened doors and made my career possible has been a mix of luck and coincidence, failure, change, hard work, and people that looked out for me.

1. My last violin lesson freshman year - 1996. I had started the year in the top symphony but no matter how hard I practiced I seemed to get worse and worse. My teacher used to have these intense two hour lessons and I felt broken. My last lesson I brought a quartet I had written and we played it together and told him I was quitting because I felt broken. My teacher agreed and told me that all was going according to plan and now I could start to relearn all of my bad habits that were all broken. I could move with him to New York. I declined and gave up any pretensions of being a violinist because I stayed broken. Instead, I left on a Mormon mission to Nicaragua.
2. Bus ride in Nicaragua - 1998, Near the end of my two years in Nicaragua, I was riding on the bus back to Managua and talking to a rice farmer that was sitting next to me. He explained how he wished he could grow a different kind of rice because what was profitable and successful for him was a short grain rice that he exported to the US and not the kind of rice he liked to eat. When I took a genetics class and realized people do things like that. At the time I was working on the grounds crew and with the snow coming I was going to have to shovel snow at 4 AM and was looking for an alternative. My genetics teacher - Polly Yoho, was a graduate student and she helped me get a job in the lab genotyping tomatoes and making interspecific crosses to find virus resistance genes and I joined the new plant breeding major.
3. Birth of first child - 2000. I planned on going to Purdue for grad school, but when my oldest daughter was born and my wife wasn't quite finished at BYU, I needed to stay longer. My wife convinced me to apply for funding from the Benson Institute and Drs Jellen and Stevens helped design a project working on quinoa instead of tomatoes. This funding paid for my fellowship but also to send me to Bolivia to make my mapping populations and work in the field. I also taught part of a genetics class. The prof - Alejandro Bonifacio, ran trials around the Altiplano and I used to ride on the back of his motorcycle to field days to demo the new varieties. After harvesting and showing the results to the local farmers he would play the charango and we would eat with the village.

More to come:

1. Poster session at Plant and Animal Genome Conference- 2002
2. Likelihood - A.W.F Edwards and The Analysis of Messy Data- 2004
3. High speed video of popcorn popping - 2008
4. Reorg right after I started at Monsanto - 2009
5. Early corn trials and visit to Canada 2014
6. Nigeria IITA cowpea advancement - 2019
7. Cotton design team 2023