Ingrid Carlson:
CLASS OF 1983
Columbia High SchoolClass of 1983
East greenbush, NY
Washington State UniversityClass of 1993
Pullman, WA
SUNY College at OswegoClass of 1987
Oswego, NY
Ingrid's Story
Life
After getting a Masters Degree in Anthropology, I moved to Hawaii and lived there for 10 years. I got to work on various islands across the Northern Pacific including Kwajelein Atoll, Saipan, and The Republic of Palau. For my 30th birthday I learned how to SCUBA dive and attained the rank of Dive Master, which is the lowest professional level in the PADI system. I was hoping to return to the Republic of Palau to work as a Dive Master there, but I never got around to it.
While I was in Hawaii I met the man I would eventually marry. His name is Roger Blankfein and he is from Long Island. How ironic that I had to move to Hawaii to find the New Yorker of my dreams.
Roger decided he really wanted to return to school to study Veterinarian Medicine, so we moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota so he could attend the University of Minnesota.
I had switched careers in the final months in Hawaii due to a bad recession, and started working for Wireless Facilities, Inc. as a Site Acquistion Specialist in the Telecom Industry. That was great fun and I got to work in the Twin Cities, Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, Michigan. But when the stock market crashed, taking the telecom industry with it, I was laid off.
I decided to work Temp and enjoy the freedom that gave me. I traveled and visited various friends out West before finally taking a permanent position at Carlson-LaVine, Inc. They are General Contractors with the same warped sense of humor as me! Plus the office is only 10 minutes from my house with no freeway driving! A big plus in this city! So I'm now the Projects Coordinator meaning I do all the things no one else wants to. But I'm also designing brochures and doing in-house publishing to highlight specific projects we have completed. I've done brochures for Banks, Dentists Offices and Churches which C-L has completed.
So compared to my life in Hawaii, it's slower paced and one could say boring, but there's something nice about that too. I'm taking fencing classes and rock climbing and I've decided to learn how to ride a unicycle! I also ring bells in the Bell Choir at my church. They are trying to get me to join the choir since I did sing with them a few times last year, but I think I'm too busy to commit to that.
Roger has finished school and is working at a clinic in Coon Rapids, which is about 25 minutes north of us. He's enjoying the challenge of the job.
Roger and I enjoy our freedom and will not be having children. We have two dogs instead that are our kids. We have a shepherd mix named Tucker that we got in Hawaii. And a dark brindle greyhound named Ponita that we adopted here in MN. Ponita was a blood donor dog at the U and we fostered her for two years before we got full custody of her.
2009 Update
I'm surprised at how out of date my profile is. Roger wasn't landing good positions in Minnesota, so we decided to move to New York where he could get better mentoring opportunities. That is when we moved to Rochester, NY. Roger got a job at a small clinic in Churchville and I registered with Office Team again and quickly landed a job that I would have for the two years we lived in Rochester. I worked for Easter Seals New York in their Development Department. We organized the yearly golf tournament and other large fund raising events (no phone solicitations). I also started writing grants for them and managed to get money for a new Hoyer Lift for the Diagnostic and Treatment Center as well as a new van for the Foxworth Group Home.
However, Roger's job soon ended and he began to work at the Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society in Albany as their interim vet. After nearly a year, they had found no qualified candidate, I agreed to move back to Albany. I really didn't want to move back to where I grew up. But after searching the area for a home, I decided that I really wanted to live in Delmar. I had no childhood connection to Delmar and it seemed to fit our life style better than the neighborhood we lived in in Rochester. We would be closer to my parents (who live in Albany) but it never became an issue. All in all, it was a great move.
College
I decided to attend the University of Oswego in upstate New York. I started majoring in Forestry, but changed to Anthropology after my first or second semester.
I hated dorm life and pretty much hated everything about college except the learning part. I had a bad advisor, so I feel I didn't get as much out of college as I could have. I'd do things differently if I ever went back.
After two years of dorm life, I moved off campus and immediately loved it. My grades went through the roof, so that was cool. But I had wanted to get out of school as quickly as possible, so I went to summer school for two summers to earn enough credits to graduate a semester early. I went to an archeological field school in Utah my sophmore year and I went to Europe the next summer to study English literature. Actually I was supposed to study Shakespeare for six weeks, but that was the summer Chernobyl melted down and Quaddafi declared war on American Tourists. It was also the summer that Fergi and Andrew were married.
So I left school a semester early to work to get money for Graduate School. I decided to go to Washington State University in Pullman. The town is surrounded by rolling wheat fields. I hated nearly every moment I was there. The Anthropology Department was full of good old boys who didn't think women should be in the field of Archaeology. It was the first time I really experienced sexual discrimination. After I finished my school work, I moved to Hawaii to work as an Archaeologist for a couple of years before returning to defend my thesis. They were so surprised that I had been working fu...Expand for more
ll time for the last two years in the field that the defense was a mere formality.
Occasionally I think I should return to school to get a Ph.D., but then common sense returns to me and I know that I will never return to grad school unless hell freezes over. If I win the lottery I would like to return to school to get a degree in Geology/Geophysics.
Workplace
I feel very fortunate to have worked in my field for over 10 years in very interesting locales. I started working in the Southwest (N.M. and UT) and the Pacific Northwest (OR), but I wound up working most of my time in the Pacific (HI, Saipan, Kwajelein, Republic of Palau). I got very good at excavating burials and mapping lava tube caves. I quickly rose to be a Field Director and later a Project Director or Principle Investigator. I even wound up managing an archaeological office for a year.
However, when the Asian economy collapsed, so did Hawaii's. Work began to get very scarce, so I registered with a temp agency. My best position was with Nextel Partners. I wound up going for a two month assignment and they held on to me for 8 months. It would have been longer, but by then my husband had been accepted to school in Minnesota, so we had to move from Hawaii.
But before I left Nextel, I wound up getting hired by another telecommunications company called Wireless Facilities, Inc. They had a huge project starting in Minneapolis and wanted local people to be involved. I was a Site Acquisition Specialist that negotiated lease agreements with building owners. Unfortunately, once the work in Minneapolis was complete I was sent to Milwaukee. Myself and one of my co-workers got the reputation for being major problem solvers. And did the Milwaukee project need help. The two of us went in there and quickly got the project back on course.
I was then sent to Grand Rapids, MI to help a beleagured project out there. I lived in the town of Ada and loved it. It was a georgeous town with awesome parks. I was responsible for all sites from Grand Rapids south to the boarder. But all the traveling got to be too much and I left WFI after three months. I was left on the bench for several months, but no new work had materialized. By this time the technology stocks had hit rock bottom and no one was doing any new building.
So I decided to register at a local temp agency. I took short term assignments and got to work at some very interesting companies. My favorite was at the office of a gravel pit. I dispatched trucks, recorded the weights of trucks leaving the site and got a lot of reading done.
After WFI let me go, I took the summer off before looking for longer term assignments. Well first I decided to try and break into the archaeology world here in Minnesota. I landed a position with Schoell and Madson doing a Phase III excavation of a Woodlands site on Lake Minnetonka. Our field director was an idiot and had the worst interpersonel skills I had ever encountered. Once the project was over they asked if I wanted to go to Fargo, N.D. to dig test pits along a 5-mile stretch of highway. Gee tempting...NOT! After being sent to exotic locations across the Pacific, Fargo was not a big draw. Plus archaeology in the Plains/Woodlands area was so boring. My area of interest was architecture. There is none in this region. So I headed back to the temp agency.
I was looking for something longer term, enjoyable and one that might become permanent. Just when I thought I'd never find such a job, one fell right into my lap. I now work for a General Contractor called Carlson-LaVine, Inc. (no relation). I'm the Projects Coordinator for the Project Managers. I also have been put in charge of all in house publishing. I design project specific brochures and advertisements. Which is kind of funny since I have no training in either field. But they like what I produce, so that's all that matters. My boss is so afraid that I'll get bored and leave that he keeps coming up with ways to keep me entertained.
I was very sad to have to leave Carlson-LaVine. I continued to work for them long distance and went back to help jump start their new web site design process. But eventually, I had to let go of Carlson-LaVine.
Working for Easter Seals New York in Rochester turned out to be challenging mainly because I had no training in fund raising (or accounting). My boss was a very old fashioned kind of boss and we got a long very well. I still help him out with computer questions on occassion.
Once we moved to Albany I became the Project Manager for our big construction project in the backyard. We put in a new in ground pool, patio and two decks to create our own private resort. Roger's work is the busiest during the summer, so we can never take a vacation during that time. So we created a vacation spot that he can enjoy when he comes home from work. I have, on occassion, hung his swim shorts in the garage and met him at the door with a frosty marquarita or beer.
Once that project was done and I had painted all the rooms in the house and made curtains for the living room, I decided that I really needed to find a job.
I registered with Office Team the day they announced that the economy was in a full blown recession. My timing couldn't have been better. It took more that 4 months for Office Team to find a job for me. But at the moment, I am currently working for General Mechanical Systems in Halfmoon, New York. As long as there is money, they will continue to have me work for them. The job is not very stimulating, but it's nice to be making money again. And I paid off all my credit card debt! The people are really nice to work for, and it gets me out of the house. It will be interesting to see what happens next!
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