What led you to a career in safety?
I always knew I wanted to go into healthcare. And if you think about safety you're really caring about people's health. I was going to go into physical therapy, and so I was in that major. But then a defining moment was, my mom was working at a plastics manufacturing company, and she was exposed to chemicals, and she was getting irritation on her forearms. She asked for gloves, and they gave her gloves that just fit over her hands and not her forearms.
And then she was still getting chemical burns and irritation from it. I remember my dad and I said, "Okay, can you just bring some dish gloves to protect you? It's better than the gloves they were providing." And it was still going through those gloves. She ended up quitting, because she was tired of coming home with chemical burns.
But I just remember thinking, okay, there has to be something more that could be done to protect people because they might not know what the rules that the employer has to follow in terms of personal protective equipment. I ended up changing majors, went into occupational safety, and learned a lot more about safety.