Where did you grow up?
I was born in Rockford Illinois, but I only lived there until I was five, and then I moved to South Bend, Indiana–Granger, specifically. That’s where I lived until I went to college. I had a lot of good friends that I made within the first handful of years of moving there and then kept all through high school. I’m still friends with a lot of those people today. I think something that goes along with marrying someone that you went to middle school and high school with, as I did with Jeff, is it feels very familiar. It’s a great shared history we have. Maybe I look back on it even a little more fondly because I know that it’s something that Jeff and I had together. South Bend is a great place to grow up and it’s a great place to raise a family. I would not move back there much to my parents’ chagrin.
What did you study/what are you interested in?
I went to Purdue and I started out in their journalism program. Purdue isn’t really known for journalism, and after my first semester of freshman year I knew I wanted to change my major. I wanted to learn graphic design, but I wanted to know more about the technical part of it, so I went into the school of technology and majored in computer graphics technology. It was a little bit of design, but mostly it was coding and designing websites in HTML and other early languages that I don’t remember at all anymore. It was also learning 3D modeling and video work.
Meanwhile, I started working at the student newspaper, The Exponent. I really just threw myself into that and I worked there all four years of college. I started out as a reporter, then I was the city editor, then the managing editor, and I also worked as the graphics editor. By the time I left Purdue, I had a couple internships in journalism under my belt, and it was really just easier to go that route. So I followed journalism, which is really my main love over coding and 3D rendering things.
What were you up to before Cardinal?
The years before Cardinal I was freelancing. I helped Edible Indy, a magazine about the food culture in Indianapolis and beyond, launch, and Piccoli Dolci, an Italian bakery business here in Bloomington get their start. I wrote a little for Bloom and a women’s lifestyle blog, but mostly I trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I suspected that I might eventually have a role in Cardinal, but there really wasn’t a solid place for me at the beginning and I just planned on continuing to freelance for as long as possible. Then we had our son Ben in November of 2014, Cardinal opened in February of 2015, and I started doing work for Cardinal in May of 2015. I feel very lucky that I was able to just kind of dabble and be a mom at the same time.
What do you do at Cardinal/elsewhere?
I’m on the marketing team at Cardinal. I run our social media channels, I’m in charge of our media outreach, I update our blog, I might work with some events like launches in new states, and I help with whatever random marketing projects are thrown my way. As an example, in 2016 Adam and I wrote, photographed, and designed a cocktail recipe book. In general, I also try to make sure that almost anything, from bottle labels to dinner menus, passes before my eyes for proofreading and copy-editing before it gets printed or goes into the world.
We have a baby and a toddler, so I feel like we’re in the thick of it right now. Outside of Cardinal, I’m usually spending time with my family. We take walks, go to the park, and visit the farmers’ market. I’m a big consumer of journalism. If you set almost magazine or newspaper in front of me I will for sure read it. It helps me keep a lot of my interests, like food or fashion travel, even if I’m not able to do those things with my time physically. Jeff and I do like to travel. At this point in our lives we’re not going to a lot of exciting places, but even if we’re going to Louisville or Chicago or Phoenix, we like to explore cities through food and drink. We’re always going to places with great cocktails and seeing what everyone else is up to. Part of it is research, but then part of it is just what we like to do.
