6 random facts about how ScienceWoman got here

Picking up on a meme for which I've been tagged by ScientistMother, I'm going to add my own little twist, and do six random facts along a common theme.

1. I chose geoscience in seventh grade because I needed a science fair project and I didn't want to do anything my parents knew something about. Between them, they had degrees or jobs in chemistry, biology, and computer science. Physics was a little daunting for a 12-year old, so geoscience it was.
2. By the time I was 17, I knew I wanted to be a particular geoscience subspecialty. My choice of colleges was influenced by the location of one of the big names in that subspecialty. More than 10 years later, it's still a big part of what I do.
3. This is not to say that I haven't wavered along the way. Amongst my ditherings, I worked for a summer in an immunology lab and had an internship with an NGO in Washington, DC.
4. If my parents had not been scientists and my school system had not pushed science on me, I think I would probably have become a lawyer. I've loved history and politics for as long as I can remember.
5. If I could go back in time and offer my 17-year old self some advice, I'd tell myself to major in engineering and take geoscience courses on the side. I could still do the same thing I do now, but I would have had better paying, more numerous options if I had bailed out of school before the PhD.
6. I never intended to go straight from undergraduate to graduate school. It simply happened because I wanted to move cross-country and I knew how to "do school" better than I knew how to find a job long-distance.

I'm not sure I know six people who haven't been tagged for this particular meme, so if you haven't been tagged and would like to be, consider yourself tagged. In particular, I tag Alice.