As a girl from Queens, I never imagined that I would eventually fulfill the wild ambition I had as a kid: to plant two feet on every continent of this wildly curious spinning rock we call home before I expired, or global warming removed the possibility altogether. Growing up, the odds seemed stacked against me—my circumstances hardly the fertile ground for such aspirations. Yet, my career in design became the unexpected bridge to that childhood ambition, turning it into a reality by November 2023.