Jodi Payne

Currently: Developer Partner Manager, Open Source, Equinix
Former role: Consulting Engineer, Cisco Systems

I work with software developers around the world to ensure that they have the infrastructure that they need to help build safe, secure, reliable systems.

I took math classes (calculus, linear algebra) at Northern before starting at the University of Michigan, and did an after-
school computer tutorial session with Prof. Don Schlientz.

I had a chem class at Michigan my freshman year there where we used high tech (calculators) to keep track of chemical
equations, it was very tedious and boring and error-prone and time-consuming. Northern had a summer class on using
new-fangled spreadsheets with VisiCalc that following summer, and I realized two things: I shouldn't be a chemistry major, and I had spent a lot of time in Ann Arbor that I could have saved if I had learned about this 6 months earlier in Marquette!

"Creativity is an import-export game" (Ron Burt)
Go outside your current department and explore what sorts of tools and technologies are in use in other parts of campus. and the area. You might very well find something unexpected and new in a place that you might have overlooked that can change your point of view.

I spent a lot of time on the Northern campus before going away to Ann Arbor. My stepdad (Dr. Lewis Peters) taught
parasitology and pre-vet and anatomy, and I'll forever be grateful to the Northern-trained nurses who took his courses and then took care of him after he had a brain injury -- they knew what he was capable of and never stopped helping him on the path towards recovery.

My grandmother is Ada B. Vielmetti who the health center was dedicated to in 1976.