I returned to Seattle in 1995 and also returned to school at the University of Washington. Initially I pursued my life passion in music and studied vocal performance in the Music Department. To meet the distribution requirements for my Arts and Sciences degree, I took GEOG 277, Geography of Cities. I began to see a pattern that hinted at an explanation for those images that haunted me from the Orient. I began to visualize the developing world as the hinterland to the United States. Next I took URBDP, Introduction to Urban Planning and GEOG 207, Economic Geography, and began to see how policies and planning initiatives affect the way people live. I began to have a sense of how an economic initiative can alter people’s lives by altering opportunities. GEOG 230, Urbanization of Developing Nations focused these issues in a way that made sense and provided fundamental explanations for things that I have experienced. This course convinced me to change my major to Geography. I began to see a way that perhaps I could make a change to make life better for the people I had met in my travels.

I continued my studies to include GEOG 448, Geography of Transportation to seek to understand linkages between nations. I saw that the west had essentially sealed the fate of the southern developing nations when the Panama and Suez canals were built. The world trade routes were permanently changed pushing South America and Africa off the major shipping route.

I took GEOG 370, Problems in Resource Management, in an effort to tie my working experience together with geography and to explore resource allocation.