I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover which came out weekly unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page.

I never got into sports at all until I was in my early 20s after my music career got going.

I started my cooking 'career' aged 15 almost 20 years ago. At the time it was quite a shock suddenly working 75 to 80 hours a week without time to play football or other sports.

In my whole career I've never seen this type of race that you had to wait for the last day. There's so many teams that are involved. You've got to smile because we're in it.

Country music in the mid-'90s was a big influence on my career and I played all the songs that are referenced in ''94' back in my club days. Joe Diffie was rocking a sick mullet and he was hotter than ever... just putting out monster hit after monster hit. It totally takes me back to those days and it makes me smile every time I hear it.

Though we do need more women to graduate with technical degrees I always like to remind women that you don't need to have science or technology degrees to build a career in tech.

Like many students I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.

I wanted to have a political career. I thought studying political science would be the best way to achieve it.

I very much enjoyed my career in science. I didn't leave science because I was disillusioned but felt I'd done my bit for it after about twenty-five years.

I was always very interested in science and I knew that for me science was a better long-term career than tennis.