Mary Grady

I was born and raised in Rhode Island, and attended the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College. Starting out as an English major, I later switched to geography, graduating in 1982. During my college years, I took time off to travel, work, sail, and fly. (For more about where I've traveled, see my Travel page.)

My first aviation job was at a small flight school in Providence, R.I., where I worked as a dispatcher in return for flying lessons, in 1979. Later that year, Federal Express hired me as one of their first female courier/ramp workers, and I finished college while working nights loading freight onto a Boeing 727. During my four years with FedEx, I made good use of my jumpseat priveleges, and flew many trips around the country in B-727 and DC-10 cockpits. I also bought a small hot-air balloon and began learning to fly it.

Shortly after graduation from RIC, I moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where I earned my private-pilot airplane certificate, and then spent a summer backpacking across Europe. I returned to Florida in the fall of 1983 to work for American Flyers flight school as a dispatcher. I also worked as ground crew for a hot-air balloon company and occasionally as sailboat crew, while studying for the GRE grad-school entrance exam and earning my FAA advanced ground instructor certificate. In 1985, I accepted a fellowship at the University of Hawaii. During two years there, I studied tropical ecology and mountain geography, taught computer graphics and geography labs, and on the side taught ground school for private pilots.

In 1987, I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where I earned a commercial pilot certificate for hot-air balloons and wrote a ground-school study manual for the Balloon Excelsior flight school. That fall, I accepted a fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder to pursue a doctorate in geography. I only stayed there for one semester, though, because the National Geographic Society offered me an internship in their Book Division, and I moved to Washington, D.C.

I stayed at NGS for an extra year after my six-month internship, and then returned to Rhode Island to finish writing my thesis for my master's degree. In 1990, I went to work as a science editor at the Rhode Island Sea Grant Program at URI's Graduate School of Oceanography, and also received my degree and began teaching at Rhode Island College.

From 1993 to 1999, I worked as a desk editor at The Providence Journal. I left in 1999 to pursue a freelance career. My work and travels since then are detailed elsewhere in this site.

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Thanks for visiting. Last updated April 2003.