A young, high school-aged version of new middle school science teacher Deana Arnold nearly cried over her trigonometry homework. Luckily, she found a solution in the form of Mr. Howard—her math teacher for all four years at Lincoln High School in Lincoln, California. Arnold would meet Howard every morning at 7 a.m., determined to understand math.

“He must have been sick of seeing me by the end,” Arnold said. “Never in a moment do I remember him ever feeling like, ‘Oh great, here she is back again.’ It was always, he wanted to be there. That’s why he was a teacher.”

After high school, Arnold entered Sierra Community College to finish her general education requirements before transferring to veterinarian school. There, she took a zoology class because she was interested in the way organisms were connected within their evolutionary history and fell in love with genetics.

“We were dissecting things all the way through the Tree of Life and learning how many similarities there were between organisms,” Arnold said. “There’s so many similarities, especially the more closely related they are, but oftentimes, the more similar something is, the more similar the DNA is.”

From that point on, Arnold had caught the science bug and decided to pursue a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in genetics at UC Davis.

When she was a senior, Arnold received an invitation from the head of the genetics department at Davis, Dr. Scott Hawley, to do her undergraduate research in his lab.

In the lab, they studied Drosophila—fruit fly—genetics. While Arnold did not choose this subject herself, she was excited to work in the lab because it was an enormous opportunity for starting her career.

“It’s a lot of fun in science to have a question that you’re trying to answer,” she said. “We talked about hypotheses in school, but to actually have a real scientific question that nobody knows the answer to, and then design experiments to try to figure out how to tease the answer out of the data was enjoyable for me.”

Arnold spent about 16 years of her career working in the science industry after graduating. She was a patent agent, an individual registered with the U.S Patent and Trademark Office who writes patent applications. A patent is a government authority or license that protects intellectual property from being used, sold or made by others. Arnold worked for two genetics-focused companies: Perlegen Sciences and Pacific Biosciences.

“A lot of my work was by myself, so I sat in a cube and wrote all day, or called an examiner and argued with them,” Arnold said. “So much of my time was spent on the technical patent stuff that I missed getting deeper into the science and trying to think about those questions more.”

As Arnold continued to long for the hands-on scientific aspect of her career, she found interest in teaching her daughters. Whenever they had trouble in science classes, she enjoyed being able to help them understand a concept.

“There’s something really special about presenting something and people are like, ‘What?’ but then you come out from a different angle and then they’re like, ‘Oh!’” Arnold said.

Arnold had considered teaching before, especially after hearing her grandmother talk about her work as an elementary school teacher, but it never seemed to align with the path she was on.