I always find the question "where are you from" difficult to answer. What do people really mean by that? I'm often compelled to reply with my life story, which is exactly what I'm about to do here :)

I was born and spent a good chunk of my childhood in St. Petersburg, Russia where my younger brother and I enjoyed playing with fire, exploring abandoned buildings (dilapidated roofs were a favorite) and generally engaging in horrifyingly dangerous activities. In hindsight it makes perfect sense that our parents would send us away every summer to visit (read: torture) our grandparents in Odessa, Ukraine. There we swam in the Black Sea until our lips turned purple and were joined by our accident-prone cousin to continue roaming around pretty much unsupervised. I was 13 when my childhood became a lot safer thanks my family's move to a suburb of Richmond, VA.

There I graduated from high school, excelled at track and field, and welcomed a sister 18-years my junior. I have to admit that I didn't have nearly as much fun in the suburbs where babysitters are required and abandoned buildings are in short supply. The first of my two stints in Charlottesville, VA lasted four years while I attended the University of Virginia and double majored in Economics and Russian Literature. I can't claim that I was a great student since I spent most of my energy and attention on the track team where in my first season as a walk-on I set the school record in the women's pole vault. I broke that record several more times in my final year at the University and to my best knowledge that mark still stands (as of August 2009).

I spent the next four years in NYC, where my first job took me into the exciting world of trading frozen meat. Realizing that it wasn't quite as glamorous as I expected, I changed direction and spent a couple of years as a financial analyst at Oscar de la Renta. I followed that up with a short run at Bear Stearns. Again, not as glamorous as they say. I quit my job, moved back in with my parents in VA and applied to business schools, thus starting my second tour in Charlottesville as a student at the Darden School of Business. During the two years there I studied, got entrepreneurial, met my future husband, and married him. We've recently moved back to NYC and are working on the rest of this story :)