Hi, everyone. I'm Hilary Kerr, the co-founder and chief content officer of Who What

Where, and this is Second Life, a podcast, spotlighting women who have truly inspiring careers.

We're talking about their work journeys, what they've learned from the process of setting

aside their doubts or fears, and what happens when they embark on their second life.

Today on the show, I'm speaking with the award-winning children's book author, Andrea Bady.

Andrea is the author of popular New York Times bestsellers like Ada Twist Scientist and Rosie Revere Engineer.

But before she was a prolific fiction writer, she actually did tech support at a software company.

She built her foundational skills in writing and copy editing as the author of a tech support newsletter, writing about computer models

and hardware for a customer audience.

When Andrea left the corporate world to start a family, she became inspired by the book

she read to her children and decided to give creative writing a try.

Andrea found that her background in technical writing gave her the ability to break down big concepts

and make them easy to understand for kids. Now, 20 years after her first book was published,

Andrea has authored dozens of published works and one of her stories, the aforementioned Ada Twist scientist, was even adapted into an award-winning Netflix animated series that was co-produced by the Obamas.

I loved getting to talk to Andrea about her own story, and I'm so excited for you to hear it.

Now, on Second Life, it's Andrea Bady.

All right, Andrea, are you ready to go?

Yeah.

Excellent.

So on this podcast, we like to start at the beginning.

What did you study in school, and much more importantly, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

So in school, I studied biology, which mostly ended up being wildlife biology, but also kind of

...