I have to start with my third grade teacher who said I would be a good teacher. I replied that I was going to be a researcher. Her reply? Then you'll be a good teacher. Mrs. Kellogg was right. My medical experience started with a brother ADHD who was frequently injured; that meant I was often the kid in the car holding a dressing over a wound while one parent drove and the other was watching the kids at home. Sitting in emergency rooms taking it all in, seeing the interactions of the staff, and the way they made people better. At some point I decided medicine was for me, but not how to get there. Through the course of getting a bachelor's degree in physical anthropology, working as a rehab medicine tech as an undergrad, and a few years after graduation working epidemiology interviewing cancer patients and controls throughout Utah. I was finding I had a talent for interviewing patients and establishing rapport. I entered graduate school in medical anthropology and took courses in statistics, study design, others that continued to give me the tools I needed to provide good data. My (gfirst computer course was "Computer programming for non-programmers" in 1966, and I learned there that we avoid GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Good motto. I worked for 17 years in NIH trials where I got to use the tools I had learned in school and continued education by taking our medical school organ system classes as I worked in different projects. When I started academic research in 1977, consent was often a handshake. Over time, we all know that has changed and I was involved in helping to make those changes, especially as I was called to act as a patient advocate. I was often the person who wrote consent forms in 1st draft because I was the person who knew the protocols intimately and also knew the patients well. About 1999, several new ACRP members in our area started meeting to form a local chapter and I saw the value immediately. I believe my membership dates to 1999 I started working with commercial clinical trials in 2000 and this was new to me; I had good local mentors and my department supported having a certified coordinator in our department. I sat for the CCRC exam in 2002 and passed. I have attended half a dozen global conferences and found a wealth of education available in both the regular program and through the workshops associated with each conference. During this time I learned the value of industry standards, the credibility we received, the confidence to make decisions, how to assess the work of others to promote training. I learned to manage research administration, regulatory affairs, and process learning. All of these things showed us as part of the bigger picture of finding cures, making life a little better, having options. In all of this, the trust of my employers, our study subjects, administrations, I have felt more autonomy in my work and the ability to choose my own work. In setting up a free-standing research clinic I found that our insurer would insure a clinic with a certified coordinator because their only claims had been where there was a on-certified coordinator. A very simple insurance cost reduction goes a long way. As I look back to a long career, I believe my certification has given me great personal satisfaction in working with patients, colleagues, and organizations outside my local research community; my colleagues and I leave behind a body of work which can be trusted, is ethical, and has benefitted countless individuals. Faces of many of the people we have helped pop up whenever I feel discouraged, and even through some redundancy, mistakes, loss of funding, their faces let me put one foot in front of the other and go forward. I'm proud to say I have made this my life's work and have ACRP to thank for being the industry standard now; we helped to make it that.