I grew up in Whittier, California: a little city in the greater metropolitan sprawl of Los Angeles. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I rode my bike through Whittier College to visit my dad’s plumbing business. Those early bike rides through a college campus inspired me to someday become a part of an institution of higher education.
As a kid from Southern California, I was drawn to how diverse people communicate with each other in writing. I enjoyed reading and writing as I participated in multiple writing camps as a child. Additionally, I learned how to play the drums as a teenager and developed a love for music and the arts—a love that textures my research interests and teaching to this day.
In 1997, I pursued my bachelor’s degree at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) as an English Major with an emphasis in Literature. I coupled my bachelor’s degree with a Technical Writing certification, which included a technical writing internship at the Unisys corporation in Irvine, California. Although I did not choose to become a technical writer after this internship, this experience gave me valuable experience on how a technical writer functions in a corporation.
After I received my B.A. from CSULB, I was accepted into the M.A. program in Rhetoric and Composition at Washington State University (WSU) in 2004. My studies in this program focused on composition studies, multimodal composition, and visual rhetoric. For my master’s project, I researched and analyzed digital music playlists and how variable structure alters the meaning of a writing product.
I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Composition at WSU in 2006. In this doctoral program, I further developed my M.A. research interests as I worked towards a dissertation based on multimodality and visual rhetoric in writing courses. My dissertation was specifically focused on how utilizing and creating comic books in college writing courses can enhance writing skills in college students. By 2010, I received my Ph.D. and I began teaching at Utah Tech University.
In my years at this institution, I have had the pleasure of teaching lower division writing courses, upper division writing courses, courses specific to the English Major, and master’s level courses. I still maintain a strong love for writing, and my belief in the transformative power of higher education seems to intensify with every semester at this university.