As part of their “New Tech Cities” series, OSTraining interviewed our co-founder, Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman.
We’re a really tight team at Center Centre. We know a lot about each other, and yet we learned some new things about Leslie, Center Centre, and Chattanooga when we read Leslie’s interview.
Some things we learned
Leslie’s had a lot of different jobs—from pushing manure to pushing pixels. She and her husband bought their house off the internet (wait, what?). Leslie loves that Chattanooga has a clean downtown. After a day of walking around a city, Leslie determines how clean the city is by looking at her fingernails (we’re filing that under, “Strange but true”).
Below is part of of Leslie’s response to the question, “Have you had a dozen different career paths, jobs, and educational goals … or just one?”
Designing and learning are at the core of who I am and influence what I do.
When I was about five years old, I was learning how to write my ABCs. I mean really write them. On proper thick ruled paper. I was focused on getting my letterforms just right. To achieve this goal, I would write and erase the letters over and over again. So much so that I would wear through the paper and have to start all over again.
When I was five, my mother didn’t scold me for erasing through the paper. She didn’t say, Leslie, you have to stop…this is crazy. Instead, she bought me more paper. She recently told me, I didn’t know it then, but you were kerning—you were letter spacing. (I have a pretty awesome mom.)
When I was a kid, my very first job was mucking out horse stalls. It wasn’t a sexy job, but I learned an important lesson early on—there is a right way and a wrong way to muck out a stall. I was fortunate to learn from someone who had experience mucking out horse stalls. I learned their process, and I didn’t get kicked by a horse. Early on, I learned how important it is to work with and learn from people who know more than I do.
At some point, I realized that I’d rather push pixels than manure. There were a lot of steps between mucking out stalls to becoming a designer.
Read the full interview to learn more about Leslie’s career path, what makes the tech scene in Chattanooga awesome, and how Center Centre is a project-based school in a project-based city.