Catherine Nakalembe

That was it.

But by chance, I ended up getting a scholarship to do an environmental science undergraduate.

And at the end, I was able to do this

You can call it like a capstone, a research project that for the first time I left my parents' house and went to the west of the country.

And I did field mapping with a GPS, a backpack, and a forest ranger.

And I remember I have this photo like in this.

It rained completely.

I was completely covered in dirt.

But I was so happy.

And I thought that I wanted to do more of that.

So I applied to do a master's.

And I ended up going to the Johns Hopkins University where I did geography and environment engineering.

It's a long story, but I didn't get the opportunity to sort of do what I'd hoped that I would do, getting a degree and then being able to apply it to a problem back home.

Then I discovered the department at the University of Maryland, and I had a chat with my PhD advisor, and he was like, how would you like to go do fieldwork in Uganda?

I was like, what?

So he worked on agriculture.

That was his main domain.

I never actually considered like crop science, et cetera.

I was always like forest because of my previous experience.

But then on, I was like, all right, this is it.