Oh no! Not another trans woman with a neocities site!
So what is this?
Calm down, dear reader. This is another weather blog, but this one really serves two unique purposes and I will, and I hope you do too, treat this as a creative exercise for me. Those are:
- It would give me a chance to learn more about meteorology on my own terms.
- It's a fun project to put on a resume, which are useful if you want to get a job nowadays.
I'm going to level with you, I'm not great™ at meteorology. I'm going to be a junior next year, and I've never really focused too heavily on the weeds. I know what CAPE is. I know what hurricanes do. I can work backwards from the SPC and identify how they made their forecasts. But me? On my own? I'm not the greatest. I haven't even taken any synoptic met classes yet.
Well. I might as well get cracking on that. I don't have long left in my degree and it'd be good to get some practice in. So that's what this site is for!
What content will you cover?
Great question! I don't know yet. I probably won't ever have a "theme." It's my website, I'll cover whatever I please! Most of the site will be dedicated to the weather, because that's the goal here. It's to get better at meteorology and "teach" meteorology to non-mets. If there's any active events, I'll cover them to both explain what causes them, the ingredients needed, and to help me understand the setup myself. I hope being able to research and explain to y'all will make me better at this.
Who are you?
A short long bio
I'm Jay! I'm a 22 year old meteorology student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I'm a Carolina girl at heart, I grew up in eastern North Carolina and was enamored by the weather for a lot of my life. I got interested while sitting in hospital waiting rooms back in 2011, watching The Weather Channel and seeing the coverage. I was nine at the time, and then later that summer we had Hurricane Irene pass through town. It was one of the earliest weather-related memories I have. From then I was hooked. 2011 was a pretty active weather year for NC, with the April 16, 2011 tornado outbreak resulting in a very rare high risk outlook from the SPC. I don't remember it, that was a bit before my memories unfortunately. If anything, knowing about it at the time might have turned me off from the weather entirely.
I got a lot of weather books as a kid. I wish I had kept literally any of them, because they'd be interesting reference material to own. I'm grateful for my family that indulged in my 4th-5h grade desires, y'all rock. Once I hit middle school I really got turned off from being interested in weather. It's not because I stopped caring, I always did care. I just hated to express it to my friends or others because I felt embarrassed by it. When you get to that age, there's a lot of judgement going on. Middle school is a rough time for many, me included. I kept my interest super lowkey and I drifted away. For a while I was interested in The Weather Channel's Local on the 8s segment, making emulators in PowerPoint, posting on the TWCToday forums, and even posting some videos on YouTube for my "emulations." They weren't good, but I had fun.
Anyways, I really drifted away from being a weather fan late in high school. At that point, I was deeply, deeply convinced I would be a CS major. I was also quasi-suppressing gender dysphoria but that's a story for later. I had convinced myself I should major in CS, and that façade would be kept up for a... very long time! Up until the January before I applied to transfer to a four-year university frankly. I had been taking dual-enrollment classes and any APs I could, still on the track to transfer for computer science. This plan would've worked well. And then COVID hit. I was, to put it bluntly, really fucking bad at online classes. Really, really fucking bad. I got a 0.3 GPA in the Fall 2020 semester online at my community college. My mom had an ultimatum, I either had to: get a job, go to school, go to the military, or move out. I was not ready to do number four, unwilling to do number three, and unable to do number one, so I had to continue to go to school, despite the awful GPA. I switched from a transfer track to a trade school track. I intended to get an IT certificate.
I hated it. I couldn't do it. I enjoy working on computers, but that couldn't be my career dude. And I was really good at the coursework, I knew I wouldn't have been bad at it as a career, I just couldn't do it. The last straw was a class where we had to write a cover letter tailored to a job posting we found in the area. I took one look at the options, knowing I didn't yet have a car or license (I puttered around on a moped of questionable legality), and emailed my advisor asking if I could register for some classes that would fulfill gen eds. I didn't care if my financial aid didn't cover it, I had to get out of town. I ended up applying to four schools, missing out on my top choice (NC State), getting into three. I agonized for a while, and I almost impulsively accepted going to East Carolina University. I'm glad I didn't, because UNC Charlotte has treated me well. I've met some amazing people, and the faculty I've worked with have been amazing. I love it here (I'm not saying this just because they're my employer), and I'm excited to see the met program keep growing. I still might pick State if I got a do-over, even knowing what I know about UNC Charlotte, but it would be a lot closer than I would have expected three years ago.