I just kind of followed the wind. I never really found my niche. I was going to be an English teacher, took a theatre class, loved it, and loved Dalhousie. It’s a really, really big university relatively speaking when you're coming out of high school. English classes have 250 people in them. So nobody knows you. I go to the Dalhousie Theatre department and there's, I don't know, 20 students, 30 students, and you call your professors Robert and David and they know your name too. It was a really warm, homey place, but I never thought I could ever be an actor because you have to be able to sing and dance to be an actor and I can't do those things and just didn't believe in myself that I could do it. So in order to study theatre, you have to study everything at Dal, you have to do the technical side and the acting side if you want to do anything. I took my technical class and fell madly in love with making things, walking away from something at the end and going, "Look what I did? Look. I can point at something I did today." So I was a theatre technician.

While I was running offices, doing accounting and answering phones and being an office manager, it just didn't feel like the right thing to do. Dalhousie is affiliated with the University of King's College and they have a one year program for people who already have degrees. It's an intensive journalism program. I had actually edited the school paper in high school and thought about journalism, but again my self-esteem was real low. I never thought I'd get in. I had started dating a guy on my very last day of being a theatre technician. We met because he had been shooting an art film with students from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. They came into the Dalhousie University Art Centre while I was up in the grid, hanging lights. He walked in and said, "Oh, I'm so tired”, laid on the floor on his back and I thought, "Lazy bastard" and of course, ended up marrying him [laughter]. That was my first impression of my husband. "Lazy bastard." He's not at all a lazy bastard. Anyhow, we started dating and Dave is a really nice guy who says things like, "You can do it." So I finally had somebody who believed in me saying, "Yeah, you can apply for journalism. You can get in." So I did and got in right away. They shortlist people who get in right away and then there's a longer application process, and I got in on the shortlist. I did really well, and then I aced my degree and got hired right out of school and there you go. I was a reporter for three years and then a reporter-anchor for two, then got hired at Global as their six o'clock news anchor and that's what I was doing when I got snatched away to Winnipeg.

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A Tedx Winnipeg talk

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