Chasers

On this episode of Chasers podcast, we had a conversation with Nika Nour, executive director of the IGDA Foundation. The IGDA Foundation focuses on improving the lives of game developers by making game development a more diverse and inclusive community. 

Nika has an intense passion for gaming; but interestingly, her love for video games didn’t start with developing them. It started, from a very young age, with playing them...until eventually, she stumbled upon the vast world of video game development.

On this episode, we spoke to Gabi Fleury, a conservation biologist. It’s a field that not many people know about...in fact, Ryan and I hadn’t even heard about it before this interview!

What’s most unique about Gabi’s story, however, is that they knew they wanted to work with wildlife, especially in Africa, since their early childhood.

On this episode of Chasers, we sat down with Jackie Shao, a culinary student. Her story is particularly interesting because she pivoted paths several times, from being a mechanical engineer to a project manager at Microsoft, to finally landing what she thought was her dream position - a program manager at Apple - before deciding her true dream was to pursue a career in the culinary industry.

Her journey truly shows us that it’s never impossible or too late to chase a passion. For her, in fact, it all started with a simple love for figure skating and physics.

For this episode of Chasers, we interviewed Matt Yang. He’s a fashion designer, who decided he wanted to commit himself to fashion school and a serious career in the industry after he had essentially finished an entire Bachelor’s degree at NYU.

Matt’s curiosity toward fashion, however, began much earlier. It followed him all the way up to his adult life...until he could ignore it no more.

In this episode of Chasers, we got a chance to sit down with Michael Pace, a country musician known for his high energy act that captures the rugged blue-collar act of traditional country while maintaining the atmosphere and lore of modern country. What's interesting about his story is that he grew up in suburban Massachusetts and spent his entire life cooking and everything that's not singing.

On this episode, we talked to Jessica Park, a genetic counselor. Now, I know what you might be thinking...what’s a genetic counselor, and what do they do? Honestly, we hadn’t heard much about genetic counseling before talking to Jess either. The field is still in its infancy and it’s not too well known yet...

On this episode of Chasers, we got a chance to talk to Nathan Graber-Lipperman. He’s actually born just a few years after the official millennial range cutoff, but he’s working on something that’s really relevant to millennials. Nathan is the founder of Unplugg'd, a venture where his goal is to allow participants to set up meetups known as Unplugs, disconnect from social media, and share good faith dialogue with each other by diving deeper into certain issues or topics they care about.

His entire life, Nathan has always been interested in building and exploring all sorts of new ideas. He started his first business as just a young student in middle school, selling t-shirts and soon after got involved in reselling sneakers.

On this episode of Chasers, we sat down with Finn Howell, a software engineer at a healthcare tech company called One Medical. Perhaps the most amazing part of her story is that she’s one of the extremely few females in the entire software engineering field. 

And, like most people we interview, she didn’t really have a desire to be a software engineer at all...until she stumbled upon it in college.

To start off season 2, we got a chance to talk to Kristine Rodriguez. She’s the founder of Declarative, a sustainable knitwear line. She creates all the garments herself and is incredibly passionate about it. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, she didn’t actually start out as a knitter though. She originally went to the Rhode Island School of Design to study graphic design...until she took a class her senior year that changed everything, and made her realize her real passion was elsewhere.

In this episode of Chasers, it’s our last one of the first season. To close it out, we got a chance to interview one of Ryan's friends from High School, Mike Nicolia. Mike has a passion for making people laugh, and fittingly, he is pursuing a career in standup comedy. It took him a while to build up the courage and finally make that jump into the comedy world, but the seeds were planted from the moment he was a kid.

Check out his page here: https://mikenicolia.com/