RANGE: Amanda’s collection of creative pursuits

While I love science, I’ve always gravitated towards art and design. When I was younger, I loved ceramics, sculpture, pastel, drawing, watercolor, oil, painting my nails and styling my hair; I’d make crafts out of anything I had on hand, and I was certain I’d be a fashion designer when I grew up. This has always stayed with me, but my curiosity towards how living things worked led me in a different direction.

The natural world is so special, and has always inspired me. Gardening, actually, led me down the academic path of genetics, but I see it as both scientific and creative: the artistry of how humans and plants fill and arrange space together.

I have degrees in biology, data science, and the wonderfully vague “Space Studies,” and I’ve taken plenty of classes that are totally unrelated to those subjects, too. Now, I sometimes feel like a “jack of all trades, but master of none” and wonder if my winding path has been a waste of time.

I’m very inspired by David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and this YouTube video from the channel UnordinaryMind. Again and again, I’ve seen how useful it is to have experience in many areas. I’ve heard people talk about this: Steve Rader at NASA discovering through an agency-wide crowdsourcing call that a critical technology was already invented by engineers for a different subject area, or a Rice professor of mine seeing that a nanotech coating he developed for spacecrafts could be an effective commercial rust-protectant product. I’m getting far from the art here, but these examples are just a few of the times I’ve seen people with wide talents have the ability to make creative connections.

This collection brings together some of the things I’ve enjoyed making across many mediums. I’ve titled this page "RANGE" in a celebration of creativity and breadth of work.

In the stu