Carved out by her experience working at her father’s hardware store as a girl, Melissa Krisak Ponzio is a scholar, a former high school science teacher, and an experienced house painter who is on a path to becoming a scientist, whenever that may be, doing her best in the meantime to be kind to herself in spite of the idea of where she is and where she isn’t at this moment in her life. This is an episode that reminds us that our lives and our careers do not always follow a self-imposed timeline.