Lois Shaffer:  

After high school, I attended U.C. Berkeley, where I discovered that the arts and humanities were far more interesting and a far better use of my natural talents than the sciences. So, in 1981, I completed the Bachelor's program in Art, with an emphasis in painting and drawing. As a fallback solution to avoid becoming a starving artist, I also completed an M.B.A. program, with an emphasis in Marketing, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1984. During my first year at Michigan, I received word that my mother had breast cancer. Dad lovingly took care of her while I finished my second year of classes. After a rigorous routine of radiation and chemotherapy, she passed away in February 1984, just two months before I received my M.B.A. The sixteen years after grad school have been spent as a marketing communications (or marcom) specialist/consultant/manager, developing advertising/promotional literature and overseeing company presence at trade shows for the fast-paced tech and biotech sectors. I've had the privilege of working at top Silicon Valley companies such as Apple Computer, Silicon Graphics and Becton-Dickinson. I flourished, however, in smaller, lesser-known companies that offered me a wider scope of responsibility and greater autonomy. My favorite area in marcom was event marketing, in which I gained hands-on experience in the logistics of trade shows like Comdex and Macworld. About halfway during those sixteen years, in 1992, I took an eight-month break to be a full-time caregiver for my father during his initial recovery period after he suffered a major stroke. Following those eight months, we moved him to Montana, where my older sister, Ellen, and her family cared for him until his passing in December 2002. My younger brother, Myron, a real estate broker in Hawaii, helped support our caregivin...Expand for more