Each release of Mathematica brings with it powerful new tools that can be applied to an ever-widening range of fields, so it's no surprise that a great many faculty members at all levels choose Mathematica as the tool around which to base their curricula. My first introduction to the software came during my undergraduate education when I took a differential equations course. As my professor went through the syllabus and explained what topics we would cover that semester, she also mentioned that we would be using Mathematica and showed some examples of what it could do. Having never used mathematical technology more sophisticated than a graphing calculator, I did admittedly have a bit of a rocky start with the language and syntax. I remember my professor spending a lecture period going over the basics of how to enter input and perform computations, but I decided to dismiss all that advice and just figure it out myself---which seemed to be a good idea at the time. I probably should have paid closer attention to my professor's tutorial, because I soon became frustrated at what seemed like a very rigid language. As I investigated further---mostly by looking at all the examples in the documentation---I quickly realized that by learning a few simple rules one could effectively harness the program and produce powerful results. Ultimately it was Mathematica's consistent language design that got me excited about learning more.

Recently, I was in Puerto Rico giving Mathematica talks to faculty and students within the University of Puerto Rico and Inter American University of Puerto Rico system. First off, I loved the islands and the weather. Second, the people were enthusiastic, understanding of my broken Spanish, and wonderful people with whom to interact and discuss Mathematica integration. On my flight home, I realized that it would be good to document a little bit of my experience talking with educators about integrating Mathematica into courses and how Mathematica 7 has completely changed my perspective (and uniformly, their perspective) as well. I've now been at Wolfram Research almost 12 years. My experiences at the company have been quite varied. I have traversed the country in the MathMobile (see below) showing lots of people at schools, companies, and government labs how to start using Mathematica; I have sat at a desk in technical support answering questions from longtime users on how to do (and fix) pretty detailed programming; I have worked in public relations to convey to the press why Mathematica is such an important topic for them to cover.