Hello, World!
My name is Sheryl Day. I’m a Chamoru American hailing from the U.S. Pacific Island territory of Guahan (Guam). In 1988, I left my island home to attend college and set roots in Seattle, Washington.
I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Washington (UW) and then studied Computer Information Systems from Edmonds Community College where I cut my teeth on programming in C, C++, and Java. At that time, I wanted to be a game developer, but changed my mind after getting a glimpse of the lifestyle and who my potential coworkers would be. At the end of my CIS program, I took an elective in web development, where my professor announced a job opening with the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Adminstration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NOAA NWFSC).
For the next 10 years, I worked at NWFSC as an Information Architect developing websites and databases and creating automated processes for visualizing data. During my tenure at NWFSC, I earned a certificate in UNIX / Linux Administration via the UW Extension and a Master of Science in Information Management from the UW School of Information (ISchool).
After working on several large, multi-disciplinary, collaborative research projects for NOAA, I began to realize the existence of inequities within the data gathering process and access to information. This led me to further my studies by earning a Master of Science and then a Ph.D. in Information Science through the UW ISchool.