With an inclination toward making things, Ben Mitchell was drawn to an engineering path until differential equations came along. The promise of being able to get his hands dirty with tools right away made the computer science major more appealing. The burgeoning tech world seemed the natural fit after graduation and an MBA gave him the management skills to complement his coding ones so that he could flex in product management roles. Luckily the ebbs and flows of the tech industry gave him opport...
Aug 21, 2023•33 min•Season 8Ep. 139
Believing that her future was in the ministry, Kristen Carlone Hurley saw a future in divinity school with a husband and kids somewhere in the Northeast. When her parents blindsided her with the news of their divorce in just before her junior year and she was going through relationship issues of her own, her faith was shaken. She dealt with a period of depression and first put the divinity school on hold until she realized she needed another path. After regrouping, she took opportunities as they...
Aug 14, 2023•24 min•Season 8Ep. 138
When Ilana Davidi Reeves walked into the computer science placement test at the start of college and she was the only woman, she walked out and found a new major. But tech-related internships at ESPN and an early internet company kept her interest piqued and on the second day of her first consulting job out of college, she found herself in their Java lab and kept programming and technology front and center in her career. Seemingly against the odds, she exceled in software engineering as one of t...
Aug 07, 2023•28 min•Season 8Ep. 137
Having decided on a life of public service, Kristina Marty pursued public administration immediately after graduating college—first in a masters of public administration program and then in various practitioner roles, mostly focused on health and human services agencies. After these work experiences, which included a little research, she decided to go back for her PhD and looked at public administration from the academic side. Starting in a tenure track position and a newborn and felt the crush ...
Jul 31, 2023•39 min•Season 8Ep. 136
We wanted to provide quick update about a previous set of episodes. Nakiah Cherry Chinchilla was kind enough to share the story of her husband and son's struggles with Huntington's Disease. In March of this year, her son August Gianpiero King Chinchilla passed away. In just one week, on what would be Auggie's birthday, Nakiah will be holding the celebration of life that Auggie helped planned. As Nakiah says: "While it took many iterations over the years, he never went too far from his original b...
Jul 28, 2023•1 min
Throughout her career, Jamie Hansen would often find herself at a juncture where a leap was necessary. She first needed to navigate a start in the start-up world on the wrong coast and then got to the Bay Area just before the dotcom bust. She then needed to navigate her way from web development roles to solutions engineering to find more stability. But the stability afforded by a big company didn’t fit with her personality and so she took another leap into food entrepreneurship. Along the way, w...
Jul 24, 2023•40 min•Season 8Ep. 135
Always with a medical future in sight, George Huang figured he would be a pediatrician just like his father. But when he got to med school and saw what surgery looked like, he changed his plans even as his father worried about the kind of work life balance that he might have in the surgical world. He ultimately found his niche performing surgeries on urologic cancers and progressed in a successful academic medical career. Not necessarily due to the speciality, but the rather the environment in w...
Jul 17, 2023•27 min•Season 8Ep. 134
Local to the area where he’d eventually go to college, Marc-François Bradley felt it was a happy accident to land there and benefit from good experiences with hockey, friends, education and the opportunity to kindle a relationship with the woman who would eventually become his wife. But like the spirit of accepting what will come for college, he didn’t launch into a career with a particularly pathway in mind. Instead, he said he set a few guardrails based on the guiding principles of seeking to ...
Jul 10, 2023•23 min•Season 8Ep. 133
Almost defying her own expectations, Eva Sheibar Heyman navigated a fast-track trajectory as a high-powered career woman with relative ease. She had started out on a marketing track in a company that embraced the digital wave just before it crested and so she developed exertise not only in content but management. After a long initial run at that company and the grounding of business school, she found C-suite roles in a number of organizations. And while she appreciated her achievements and lifes...
Jul 03, 2023•25 min•Season 8Ep. 132
Although generally a good student, Eric Jensen wasn't particularly driven to excel in the classroom. Slightly more interested in keeping track of his favorite jam bands than his studies, he ditched a science track for an English major. Upon graduation, he still found a way to meld his longstanding interest in science with his English degree, ultimately ending up in advertising for the bio pharmaceutical world. When the time came to try pivoting, he went to business school. Yet when given the cha...
Jun 26, 2023•29 min•Season 8Ep. 131
Since he didn't have a solid idea of where or how he would make a career in biology, Stephen Haddad veered away from science in the early part of his career. He started out in management consulting and was happy to get a broad view of how business works, but the siren call of science made him take a smattering of research positions before realizing that he needed to go back to school for more specialized training in genetics and epidemiology. As it turned out, not getting into a scientific role ...
Jun 19, 2023•24 min•Season 8Ep. 130
As a kid, Amy Harman Burkart wanted to be a lawyer like you see on tv with the courtroom lawyering and criminal procedure. After law school, she honed in on being a federal prosecutor and set herself up to be in the right place at the right time. Timing, though, is a funny thing. When her husband wanted to go to business school she decided it would be good to try to expand their family so was an adjunct law professor when she became a mother. Then just as she was ready for the role in Boston, th...
Jun 12, 2023•20 min•Season 8Ep. 129
Entering college, Laura Bright was drawn to both French and math, two subjects she exceled in in high school. French remained something that came easily and she took for fun. But the math she took in college didn’t look like high school math and she wondered if that was the right path. As the department was combined with computer science, she took the advice of a female researcher and tried her hand at computer science. She was drawn the more technical sides of her field but never considered her...
Jun 05, 2023•32 min•Season 8Ep. 128
In college, Nathan Paine exhibited an unbridled free spirit—playing Hacky sack, riding a motorcycle, and letting his long hair flow like his multi-colored graduation robes. His love of languages and cultures—inspired by living in France in high school and taking language study in Brazil in undergraduate days—took him to Japan to teach English for a year. That turned into nearly two decades in Japan with a number of international adventures and left him with a resume that reads decidedly more cor...
May 29, 2023•21 min•Season 8Ep. 127
Going into college, Heather Morein French thought that success meant pursuing either business, law, or medicine as those would provide the kind of stability her childhood hadn’t afforded her. She had an interest in science and though the classes she experienced were quite challenging, she knew the humanities courses with reading heavy curricula would be even more intimidating, given her dyslexia diagnosis. She made it through with an eye toward a career in medicine, though wasn’t so sure about i...
May 22, 2023•25 min•Season 8Ep. 126
With visions of a biology PhD dashed in a senior lab experiment gone way wrong, Andrew Obenshain envisioned a business career that would ultimately land him as CEO of a biotech firm. The industry being in its nascent days, there weren’t many avenues there, but he found his way into a biotech consulting firm and later a biotech venture capital firm. Realizing if he wanted to be a CEO he’d need to know what CEO’s do and realized they all had on-the-ground operations experience within a company. So...
May 15, 2023•38 min•Season 8Ep. 125
When Jackie Kim Chappel left Hawaii for college in the east, she was leaving more than the island lifestyle behind. For her own mental wellbeing, she severed ties from her tiger mother and started exploring all the different ways she could be in the world. She was happy reading and writing and researching and started a career in marketing. The New York life wasn’t hitting all the marks and her eventual husband moved back to Hawaii, so she found a job in media planning and research back home. Onc...
May 08, 2023•29 min•Season 8Ep. 124
New Hampshire native Jessica Drolet Wadlow felt college was home away from home being so close. She got involved in many things and was an economic major who went directly into the corporate world mostly out of interest but also because she had some loans to pay off. She landed in a management rotation program at JP Morgan and then went to business school. She switched careers into brand management and found herself at Johnson & Johnson where she stayed for many years. Needing to make a phys...
May 01, 2023•26 min•Season 8Ep. 123
After high school, guest Michael Anderson was wrestling whether he wanted to arrive at college as a Michael or Mike. It became a moot point after his Boy Scout qualities were immortalized a nickname given to him in orientation: Ranger. Known thusly ever since, Ranger soaked up the experiences of college and yet didn't leave with a clear path in mind. Early jobs in Boston were of the "work to live" sort, providing him enough structure and income to allow him to concentrate being in the moment wit...
Apr 24, 2023•27 min•Season 8Ep. 122
Guest Amy McLean Sprole grew up in Kansas and knew two things when she was graduating high school: She wanted to go into medicine and she wanted to spread her wings outside the midwest. She immediatly dove into the pre-med track and was so focused that she was able to do all of those requirements and still make time for international study abroad opportunities, including an art history experience in Italy. She thinks that out-of-the-ordinary adventure made her stand out in med school application...
Apr 17, 2023•24 min•Season 8Ep. 121
Welcome back to Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley. We are thrilled to be bringing you another great season of stories that remind us that you don’t have to know exactly where you’re going, you just need to be open to the adventure that awaits. As in all our previous seasons, in each episode we will talk to our guests—all a quarter-century-plus after college—about who they were as they graduated, who they thought they’d become, and how they’ve traveled down various roads to get where they a...
Apr 16, 2023•1 min
Hi, Roads Taken listeners. The show will returning for another season on Monday, April 17. We have spent our hiatus going to bed at a reasonable hour on Sunday nights and lining up a slew of great guests for you. So you have only a couple more weeks of waiting to hear their journeys. (Listen to find out how we went from season 3 to season 8!) Just make sure you have subscribed or you're following in your favorite podcast app and that your auto download feature is turned on so you don't miss any ...
Apr 03, 2023•1 min
After another successful season, which hosted our 120th guest, Roads Taken will take another brief hiatus. During the break, revisit the rich archive of past episodes at RoadsTakenShow.com and also nominate yourself or another storyteller to be on the show. We will do some interviews this winter and come back in the spring with a new slew of stories for our next season. Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley Music: Brian Burrows Email the...
Jan 23, 2023•2 min
Guest Peter Jastreboff had considered a variety of paths to travel at college, from politics to medicine. When he actually started, his interests remained varied, diverging from those early thoughts and staying seemingly scattered. He ended up melding computer science and psychology into a major to better understand neural networks and minoring in religion. Put those pursuits together with his extensive time at the college radio station and it’s clear that at the core of his interests lies a fas...
Jan 16, 2023•20 min•Season 7Ep. 120
Going along with the flow was the natural way for Jack Kolodny. He tended to stick with what he knew--particularly those things where there were cut-and-dried, right-and-wrong answers but he also followed his interests and things that other nice people were interested in and cultivated an interesting life in college. Upon leaving, he didn't change course so much, hearing from a friend that management consulting was fun and following nice people to a good firm. He characterizes this approach as b...
Jan 09, 2023•31 min•Season 7Ep. 119
Guest Ben Brainard had cared for only a goldfish before getting to college but he somehow had the idea of becoming a veterinarian. He thinks it might have been on account of reading James Harriot’s tales of days spent bucolically going from farm to farm treating animals of all sizes. But even after doing the pre-med track and shadowing vets in Vermont he still didn’t have the full picture of what a diary animal doctor did. In vet school he discovered much of the reality of that work was caring f...
Jan 02, 2023•31 min•Season 7Ep. 118
Guest Shilyh Warren was comfortable in college having uncomfortable conversations about inequality and gender and felt herself to be a bit of a ramble-rouser. She wasn’t exactly sure what her path would be like but she wanted to emulate the activists who went out and made a difference in the world dismantling systems. Her first job after college was doing political organizing, where she realized how hard that work was and the pace of change didn’t meet her expectations. After investigating a few...
Dec 26, 2022•23 min•Season 7Ep. 117
Guest Chris McGee loved science--even lab work--but it was really the story behind the science that captivated him. He thought that probably meant being in the biotechnology industry, but wasn't exactly sure how that would manifest in his life right after college. In an early attempt, he realized he was too far removed from the impact of the work. At the next company, he was getting closer to the actual work, but it wasn't the kind of work I wanted to be doing. At that point, the suggestion from...
Dec 19, 2022•22 min•Season 7Ep. 116
Guest Christopher Kelly spent many a night during his college career in a film screening, honing a knowledge and love of cinema. But even more than his abiding love of film was his passion for writing about it and reflecting on culture more broadly. It wasn’t immediately obvious, however, how to make a life’s work of that. After a few placements at magazines and a freelance career that could keep ends meet, he applied on a whim to an open film critic position at a newspaper in Fort Worth, Texas,...
Dec 12, 2022•34 min•Season 7Ep. 115
Guest Blair Seidler Hammond navigated her freshman year of college knowing that her mother was sick with cancer. Her mother died at the end of that year and when Blair returned after the summer break, she was still trying to process and understand what the purpose of life was. Feeling the answer was to live into every moment, she prioritized daily joys such as painting and sailing. Realizing her fatalism might be a little outsized, she started reevaluating what a well-lived life was, and was det...
Dec 05, 2022•27 min•Season 7Ep. 114
