My Life in Summary

For those people who don't know my entire life story, I've decided to outline some basic information. This page is intended both for people who know me now and are interested in learning about my past, and for those who knew me earlier and would like to know what's happened to me since (but don't want to read all the MegDesk back issues).

In writing this, I've learned that trying to decide on the key points to include from one's life is an interesting (and rather difficult) exercise. Think about it sometime. And I'm sorry if you think I omitted or included something I should not have. As always, feel free to complain.

The Early Years

My life began 20 October 1979, when I was born Margaret Ellen Gotshall in Franklin, Indiana. The first significant event in my life took place that November, when I was only one month old. This was when my best friend Erin was born.

I grew up (with Erin) at Franklin College, eating malt balls from the bookstore and playing in the bathtub in the bathroom of my dad's office. (Why did my dad's office have a bathtub in it?)

When I started school, I attended Webb Elementary School and later Custer Baker Middle School. Outside of school, I was in Girl Scouts and 4-H and continued in both through high school.

The Teenage Years

At 14, I spent the summer living in Japan through a 4-H exchange program. My grandmother is very active in the Japan-America society, and my sister Katie was one of the first students to take Japanese when it was first offered at the local high school. She had participated in an exchange through a sister school in Kuji, and our family had hosted a number of visiting Japanese students both through school and through 4-H. While I was in Japan, I spent a month in Tokyo taking language classes and then a month on the southern island of Kyushu, living with a girl we'd hosted a few years before.

The same year, I began attending Franklin Community High School. During 8th grade, I'd taken a year of Japanese at the high school as an extra class before school. This meant that I was able to take a total of five years of Japanese before graduating. My other electives were art classes, including drawing and graphic design, and two years as an editor on the school newspaper.

I joined the Japanese Club and Honart, the school's art club. I was also in National Honor Society, Japanese National Honor Society, and Quill and Scroll, although none of these seemed to do anything other than induct new members once a year. I skipped out on athletics, but I was part of Academic Competition, competing on the English, Fine Arts, and Interdisciplinary teams.

My other big extra-curricular activity was a part-time job at the local music/video/book store. I learned very early the old axiom that it's not what you know, it's who you know. Erin and I spent a little too much time there, and we'd gotten to know the manager a little. When a position opened, I dropped off an application that conveniently landed on the top of a rather large pile. Later, Erin joined me at work, landing a job without even submitting an application (the manager just called her and asked if she wanted a job, rather than trying to wade through the 50+ applications waiting to be considered). We both worked at the store through all of high school, amassing large media collections and meager wages.

When I graduated, I ended up with a scholarship from the National Association of Recording Merchants that was probably worth more than all my paychecks combined. The only eligibility criteria was that you had to have worked in a music store for at least a year. They really do have a scholarship for anything!

The College Years

After high school, I moved to West Lafayette, Indiana to study computer science at Purdue University, my third choice school. Yes, third!

My first choice was Vanderbilt, where I was accepted but was offered an insultingly low aid package. Not being a grossly wealthy southern debutante, I got quite a bit of need-based aid, but the only merit-based money they proffered was a tiny amount required by my listing them as my first choice as a National Merit Scholar. Number two was Carnegie Mellon. They were willing to cover quite a bit of my tuition, but with such a high price tag, it still would have been difficult to come up with the difference.

In the end I decided to go with Purdue, since they had a well-respected program and were willing to pay all of my (much-lower) in-state tuition. I was a little sad not to be moving farther from home and I wasn't sure how well I'd like attending such a large school. It turned out for the best, since my parents were glad to be able to visit once a month, and I ended up really liking the big-school environment (especially when I tripped and fell flat on my face in the middle of University Street and realized that I didn't need to be embarrased, because I'd never recognize any of the people around even if I saw them again).

I started school in the Honors CS program, one of only four girls in a class of 35. I made a lot of good friends before most of us shirked the honors program in favor of us less-restrictive requirements and more interesting senior electives. In the few years I stuck with it, I set myself up well for a math minor that I did decide to finish before graduation.

Unlike high school, I was never very active in campus organizations. For some reason, the women our year made a big deal out of not joining the CSWN (Computer Science Women's Network). I think it had something to do with reverse discrimation, in that men weren't always allowed to attend meetings. I was in ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), but our chapter of ACM was mostly just about free pizza, bad movies, and having a great office location to hang out in the CS building's basement.

However, I did serve as vice president of my dormitory for a year, which had its moments. I lived in the dorms all through college, since scholarship money can't really be used for apartment rent. I spent three of those years in the oldest women's dorm on campus, Duhme Hall (officially pronounced "do me"), which was built in 1934. The old architecture created some very unique room layouts, and I spent my last two years in a single room with a bay window and window seat. An abundance of single and otherwise unique rooms meant that fortunately I wasn't the only upper classman in the building.

My part-time job during college was to serve as a UTA (undergraduate teaching assistant) for the introductory programming course in Java (Purdue is big enough that they have undergrads teaching some of the labs). My second semester I started as a grader, working with one of the grad TAs, and from my sophomore year on, I taught a two-hour lab section once a week.

At the end of my freshman year, the professor who was teaching the course arranged summer internships for me and two of my classmates to work in the smart cards division of Schlumberger in Austin, Texas. I'd been planning to study abroad the next summer, but that fall, I spoke with one of the Schlumberger recruiters and asked if I could do a second internship at one of their offices in Paris. They set it up, and I spent three months living and working in Paris. I did a third internship with Schlumberger back in Austin and received a full-time job offer at the end of it.

The Recent Years

After the fall of the dot-coms, the entire tech industry seemed to fade. Some of my most talented friends at school had difficulty finding positions and most ended up either in grad school or working for defense contractors. I was very glad to already have a job offer, and the summer after graduation, I moved to Texas.

I ended up joining a huge project at Schlumberger that I knew a little about from my last internship, where I'd met some of the people who were now my co-workers. In the year I'd been gone, work on the project had been increased significantly, and a number of contractors had been brought in to help.

At the time, a popular diversion at the office was the foosball table, and as an intern, I'd certainly spent my fair share of time playing. It was during a foosball match that I met Lucas Natraj, one of the contractors. Over the next few months, we chatted a few times and ended up going out that fall. The following spring we were engaged, and the following winter we were married.

Lucas is an Indian citizen, but he was born in Bahrain, a small island off the coast of Saudi Arabia. He lived there until high school, when his family returned to India, and he began attending a British boarding school. He went to university in Bombay and then went to work for Infosys, a large IT contracting company, in Bangalore. He'd been with the company only a few years when he was sent on a 6-month assignment to Schlumberger. That 6-month assignment has now stretched into 3 years.

Also shortly after I joined Schlumberger full time, the company announced that it would be closing its office in Austin. This was scheduled to take place over the next year, with our project being the last to leave. After years of being pushed back, it was finally announced that our project woud be leaving Austin by October 2005, and that it would be relocated to Beijing, China.

I was asked to be one of the developers to move to Beijing for a year to help with the transition, and Lucas was one of the contractors asked to go. I was also chosen as one of the people to remain in Austin until October, supporting our testing efforts while new development begins in Beijing.