In August of 2024, I began a small business with the intention of formally selling some items I had already sold casually. In January of 2025, I officially registered my new small business, itty bitty builds. During this same month, I secured my first vendor deal with the Bakken Museum located in Minneapolis. Shortly after that, I became a vendor at the Meet Minneapolis Visitor Center. Starting in July 2025, my products will be for sale at the MSP International Airport.

I am in charge of all of the marketing for this business, retail coordination, digital design, website management, financial record keeping, and product design. 

The current inventory consists of magnetic topographical lake maps, keychains, magnetic picture frames, ornaments, notebooks, and tote bags-- with more designs to come!

If you are interested in learning more, you can visit the itty bitty builds official website at www.ittybittybuilds.com.

I worked at the HSL Makerspace during the last year of my undergraduate degree and for both years of my maters program. The Makerspace is a lab available for all students, staff, and others who are affiliated with the University of Minnesota. There are SLA & FDM printers, sewing/embroidery machines, a CNC mill, laser cutter, Cricuts, and Adobe software, to name a few. My job was to learn and understand the equipment so I could help attendants with their creative projects. I also created instructional material, display items, and conducted workshops. I won an award at this job for Outstanding Student Employee in 2024. You can learn more about the award and my work at the Makerspace in this article.

Onni Creative, a LA based set design company, reached out to me in the summer of 2024 to ask if I could help them with a sewing project. They wanted 50 pillow cases to send to US movie theaters for the promotion of the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie-- with the permission of Warner Bros. I consulted on the pillow case design and fabric type and sent the team my proposals for each. In addition to this, I sent them projections for material and labor costs. Once everything was finalized, I sourced the material and sewed all 50 pillow cases with an industrial sewing machine and serger. I then mailed the pillow cases to Onni Creative.

At this research project, another student researcher and I, on behalf of the UMN's Human Dimensioning Lab, partnered with a start-up medical device company based in Canada. We designed and carried out usability tests on their finger scanning device in order to report to the company on its current ergonomic state. We ran the test on 10 participants which included having them manipulate the device to their comfort level, taking photos of their preferred positions, and taking 3D scans of their hands with and without the devices so we could take measurements. We wrote a report for the company explaining our findings, as well as offered recommendations on how the company can improve the ergonomics of their device. We also gave them measurements of our participants' hands and fingers, as well as general recommendations from national anthropometric databases such as ANSUR  in order to inform their design decisions of the device. 

I worked at the Rouman Cinema in Rhinelander, Wisconsin from January 2017 until I moved out of state for college in August of 2019. During most of my summer breaks, I would come back and work this job-- the last time being summer of 2022. After working as a regular employee for 7 months in 2017, I was promoted to a manager position. At this job, I supervised other employees, sat in on interviews, trained new hires, built the employee schedules, open and closed the building, made bank deposits, and inventoried and ordered stock for the arcade.  The owner of the cinema also ran a candy shop and on the weekends, I would often drive around Wisconsin to cater at weddings, graduation parties, and city wide events where we served gelato. I was also responsible for creating hand-drawn designs for these events which you can view here.

I worked with OTE my first year of school at the University of Minnesota. I worked as a Transitions and Experiences Intern and was in charge of a lot of the communications and programming for some of the Living Learning Communities (LLCs) on the UMN Twin Cities campus. These are communities of students who live in on-campus housing and receive support from the OTE office. I wrote many of the digital communications that Orientation and Transition Experiences put out including emails to the entire class of second year students and transfer, Facebook posts, and designing and writing newsletters. Another aspect of this internship was the coordination of events for the LLCs I was in charge of. Also at this job, I helped with the orientation of incoming first year and transfer students during Orientation Week.

In this role as a teaching assistant, another assistant and I helped a professor lead a class of 30 undergraduate students. In this role, I generally helped plan the weekly in-person classes and facilitated classroom discussions. I graded assignments, posted Canvas announcements, and coordinated our virtual classes. I also often worked with students on an individual basis- checking in on them if they missed multiple classes and addressing their questions and concerns about assignments. This position ended up being particularly unique because the professor suddenly had to leave their position due to medical reasons. We got a new professor assigned to the class and it was my and my co-assistants responsibilities to fill them in on the material. Strangely, again, this professor also had to leave for medical reasons so we had yet a third professor assigned to the class. I felt like I bore a lot of the responsibility of these transitions because I took a lot of initiative to keep the students informed and made some executive decisions about holding and canceling classes. My co-assistant and I also were the only consistency in the teaching team throughout the semester and I took that very seriously because I valued the education of the students enrolled in the class.