Ariel Waldman

And they were looking with someone with design and advertising experience and someone who was connected to

startups in San Francisco, which I was at that point.

And yeah, I applied and I got the job and it completely transformed my life because then I realized, oh, I'm valuable to science as I exist today.

And had I known that I could just walk in and like work for NASA without changing my career trajectory, I would have done that long ago.

And so working at NASA is what ultimately got me exposed to learning about people working in Antarctica because it's an analog for Mars and icy moons in our solar system.

I was like, that's really cool.

I want to like work in Antarctica with scientists.

And that trajectory was not as simple as an email.

That was, I learned about a grant that could get me to Antarctica or had a chance to get me to Antarctica.

And I applied to that grant for five years.

And then I got the chance to go to Antarctica from that grant.

And the whole thing was, yeah, about filming microorganisms because I learned about all these researchers who are just looking at all these cool animals, but no one really ever gets to see them.

And the researchers don't get to really film them even though they want to.

And so they're missing out on behaviors and the public is missing out on getting to see what cool creatures live in Antarctica.

It's kind of a single email.

I'll take it.

So it's like I applied for this grant.

It was the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant.

And I thought, well, I want to work with researchers, but I don't have a PhD.

So my best chance, I figured, was to apply through this grant since my background is in art.