Michael Polkinghorn:  

Life Where to start... Hmmm... If I had to sum up my life in a phrase it would be, "Trimming sails to match the winds of change", as they have blown me all over the place! My life up to 16 was as quiet and average as you could wish, growing up in Elkhart, Indiana. Elkhart is a small town in Northern Indiana with all the great things that that implies (fishing, baseball, snowball fights). Then, halfway through my high school career, my family moved to San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. All of a sudden I went from a town of 40,000 to a community of several million and from one of two high schools in a town to a high school which spoke four different languages (none of which was English). Talk about culture shock! I muddled through some how and I'm grateful for the chance to experience so many more cultures so early in life. After High School, I went off to Chico State in Northern California. The town reminded me a lot of my old hometown of Elkhart. It too was a small, closely knit town. It was friendly too. It was not unusual for complete strangers going to pizza to ask your and your friends to join them. It also had a good Mechanical Engineering school. This fit my plans perfectly as my future as I had it laid out was to graduate in engineering, join the Marine Corps as an Aviator and then graduate to the Astronaut program. Simple eh? Then the winds of change started to blow. It only took me a year to realize that I wasn't cut out for Engineering, so I switched to my long time love of rocks and started studying Geology. My Marine Corps career also came to a screeching halt. In my first flight physical, the Flight Surgeon started asking me questions about all sorts of things he found wrong with me. This kicked off two years of repeated visits to various air bases' medical staffs. In the end the doctor decided that there was just too much wrong and I was dis-enrolled from the flight program. I was devastated. My whole life plan was down the drain and I wasn't even drinking age! So, time to trim the sails and go to plan B. I graduated in Geology. I enjoyed my time in Chico too. I liked it so much that I stayed another three years. They were good years too, full of four-wheeling in the mountains, ham radio expeditions and medieval recreation with the SCA. Life calls though. During the next few years, I worked in both petroleum and geothermal exploration in a bid to be gainfully employed and yet not have to move from Chico. However, the bottom fell out of both of those markets each time within six months of my joining each industry. 400 resumes later, I landed a job in environmental geology in Marin. The new job was with a startup company and like most startups, that meant long hours. In this case 12 hours a day 6 and 7 days a week. Work to home and then back home and back to work. Once in awhile an occasional day off. It wasn't much of a life. This became especially evident when I started playing hockey again and realized that I didn't really have time to do so! Where did my life go? So, it was back to school, this time to UCSC extension in Santa Clara where I studied Environmental Health and Safety (something I had been doing for the startup). Then the wind shifted again! While looking for a job after graduation, I pick...Expand for more