Natural Disaster

Almost a year had passed at WMAQ, and Chicago was really starting to feel like home. It was the summer of 2007 when I got a message from my old friend and former classmate from Valparaiso University, Paul Oren. Paul and I had been resident assistants years earlier at Valpo, and he was now teaching at our alma mater.

In his e-mail, Paul was telling me that Valpo had a class called Weathercasting that they had recently developed, and he thought I would be the perfect professor.

“Ging, this is an adjunct position. One day a week. You would be brilliant.”

And by the end of a short and sweet conversation with the same guy I used to patrol the floors with at Alumni Hall, I was taking on another job: adjunct professor.

I walked into that classroom in the fall of 2007 with such determination. I was wearing one of my red Ann Taylor power skirt suits with fresh-out-of-the-box matching kitten heels. I was so proud to be returning to Valpo just five years after graduating, especially because this time I was returning as a teacher. The doors of Schnabel Hall swung open and the smell of books and labs and maps washed over me like a warm breeze. Even though I had studied meteorology in a different building across campus, this one had a special memory for me.

Less than a decade ago, I had been a campus radio cohost broadcasting from this building. It was initially my friend James’s show, and he had asked me to cohost. The timing was perfect. I had recently decided that I was interested in being a television meteorologist. I was working on my science degree, but I didn’t have any education in, much less practical experience with, being on air. The concept (and I use that word loosely) for the show was a mix of random music and talk-show-lite ramblings by me and James. Our audience probably never broke double digits, but we didn’t care.

The small audience allowed us to grow more comfortable speaking into the microphones. But after a few months, we grew restless and began to wonder what we could do to increase our listeners. After a blue-sky pitch session (a term that means nothing is off the table and no ideas are dismissed out of hand), we landed on what was probably our craziest idea. We were going to rebrand our broadcast with the provocative title of Topless Radio. We hung newspaper over the glass booth that other students passing by could see through to give the illusion that we were both buck naked from the pants up inside the studio. We weren’t, of course, and I seriously still can’t believe anybody believed us, but they did. Very quickly our show became a huge scandal at our Lutheran university, and as a result, our audience grew. Somehow we managed to stay on the air as Topless Radio for the entire spring semester without the administration shutting us down. Now that we had at least a few dozen listeners, James and I felt like legitimate radio personalities. The campus paper wrote a story about us, and we were asked to participate in a local Jell-O wrestling event for charity. And it all began in Schnabel Hall, where I was about to deliver a lecture on “weathercasting” to a roomful of mini-mes.

These kids were lucky. When I was in school, we had to find our on-air experience for ourselves out in the real world, which is pretty impossible. I was jealous of the opportunity they had to take this class, and I was looking forward to playing a role as teacher and maybe mentor.

Leaning against a desk next to my lectern was a copy of my very first billboard as a professional meteorologist, wearing an electric-blue blazer with black buttons. Even in that terrible pantsuit, that billboard made me feel like a prodigal superstar. It didn’t matter at all that there were only six students in the class. I was going to pour myself into each and every one of them and make them all get jobs. (Postscript—I am proud to report that today four of the six students from my first class are currently working as television meteorologists, and many more from the six semesters I taught are in television.)

Only one of the students was female, and I knew the moment I met her that she was going to be a rock star. I knew she was going to fight the same battles I’ve had to fight just because of my gender. Her name is Ellen Bacca, and she would later become my intern and prodigy. I used to joke that she had so much talent that I was going to teach her almost everything I knew so she wouldn’t take my job. Ironically, today she has my old job at WOOD TV in Grand Rapids and is teaching weathercasting at Valparaiso.

When I was a student at Valpo, the emphasis was on going on to grad school to get your PhD. That’s it. The path was set for a lifetime of academia, or working in-house for the government or a big corporation. I don’t believe anyone from my graduating class at Valpo went into broadcasting but me. And that’s fine. I’ve always been in the minority as a woman interested in science, so I feel compelled to speak for and support that minority. And even though it’s been a few years—okay, a few minutes—since anybody’s called me a “weather girl,” I know it’s still a default title for any female meteorologist, so I fight the good fight. I used to wonder why nobody ever says “weather boy,” but lately I’ve started to think of it as a non-gender-specific pejorative. Nobody who loves science as much as I do, who spent four years studying differential equations and linear algebra, deserves to be reduced to a sexualized cliché.

Unfortunately, I have had to fight the prejudices many harbor toward television meteorologists since long before I even was one, and it began right here at Valpo. One of my professors, whom I admired and respected, told me that a career in television would be nothing more than a “waste of my brain.” It was an awful feeling at such a young age to be told this dream I had that filled me with excitement and purpose was basically stupid. Because, for whatever personal reasons he had against television, he refused to write me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship I was applying for.

“I used to be on the board of this scholarship. I know what they are looking for. And it’s not you,” he told me.

Seriously? So on the one hand, he thought I was too smart to be on television, but on the other, I was too dumb to be seriously considered for a science scholarship. Welcome to the paradox of being a smart woman.

I wanted to tell him he was too stupid to be molding the minds of the next generation of scientists, but instead I simply took my application a few doors down to a female professor who was happy to write the letter of recommendation for me. It makes me sad to think that, at such a young age, I had already accepted that men would think it was okay to dismiss me so easily. But at least I was smart enough to figure out how to go to the right person to get what I wanted. As a punch line, a week later I brought him an application for a scholarship from Glamour magazine, just to see if he would write that. Of course he was happy to.

Which is how that one young woman in my class, Ellen Bacca, fueled my passion to teach. To this day, she consults me before she makes any big career moves, and although the months of wisdom I imparted to her in Weathercasting and Weathercasting 2 were, I believe, helpful, I think it’s our relationship and my commitment to being her mentor that matters the most to both of us. Just last summer, she and her husband came to my parents’ pool while we were home visiting. I felt such pride talking to her about her career and how much she felt I was a part of her journey.

I made sure every student I taught, especially the women, knew that we are no less scientists just because we choose to express science on television. Yes, I wear brightly colored dresses, high heels, and lipstick, but I’m also a Certified Broadcast Meteorologist by the American Meteorological Society, a distinction that is held actively by fewer than 350 television meteorologists in the country. (The certification process requires having a BS in meteorology, passing a difficult test, and submitting a tape that must be approved by their committee.)

People still think it is okay to call me a “weather girl.” It’s not. But I get it. When television news was just starting, weather girls were women who recited the information created by meteorologists at the National Weather Service. We’ve come a long way. Today, almost everyone you see doing weather has a science degree and is genuinely interested in the atmosphere. The job is just too hard and too challenging to pursue if you don’t love the weather.

I am the first female chief meteorologist at a network. And I want to scream it from the mountaintop, or at least Times Square. The crusade to be taken seriously as a scientist despite my gender and to celebrate all women who love science as much as I do is one I am committed to. I have hope that one day the term “weather girl” will be as obsolete as “housewife.”

I was determined that this was not going to be a class where I droned on about theory, reading, or problem sets that my students would never use in their careers. More than anything, I wanted to give them practical tools that would make their transition from college to career a little easier than mine had been. To that end, I made them come to class in on-air clothes, trading in their comfy college sweats for suits, ties, and pantsuits. I taught them how to apply for a job, how to negotiate a contract, and how to gracefully exit a job when the time was right. One of my fondest memories came in my third semester of teaching, when I had eleven guys and Ellen in Weathercasting 2. I made them all sit around the lecture table in front of Mary Kay makeup tutorials. I will never forget the image of eleven guys trying on makeup.

I loved watching the students get on the green screen for the first time, which started the very first day of class. What I found was that some people are just inherently talented, but there are aspects of being on air that can be taught and practiced. Here are a few examples of TV oddities that folks in news commit.

Vagina hands is that odd way of holding your hands when you are on television. I don’t know where it started or why it hasn’t been abolished, but in my class, it was. I would always tell them, Stand like you do at a party, like you do naturally. If you wouldn’t talk to your mom holding your hands in a diamond shape like a vagina, then don’t do it on TV.

The crutch is a reference to something a person does or says when they get nervous on television. It’s the “Uh…um…” or “As you can see…”

I was ruthless with my students when it came to ridding them of these habits before they got too ingrained. It was inspiring to me to see them build their confidence without their crutches. Everybody responds to confidence. It’s exciting, it makes us trust you, and it’s a huge component of being successful on television.

There are many of these, but a few of my pet peeves are residents, motorists, and massive. Motorists? Residents? Aren’t they just people? The word massive has been so overused, it has lost all meaning to me. Massive sinkhole, massive manhunt, massive storm…so what really is massive?

To this day, I get calls, texts, and e-mails from former students asking for advice on contracts; or they want to share the great news that they got their dream job. My former student Sean Bailey just got his third job, the one he has been gunning for his whole career, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I love hearing from my former students like Sean because it always reminds me that I have a purpose to pass on what I have learned, and that I can make a difference in people’s lives. Everybody loves that feeling.

WHEN YOU STEPPED INTO GMA FOR THE FIRST DAY OF YOUR DREAM JOB, ANY ADVICE FOR ME AS I STEP FOOT INTO MY DREAM JOB?

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO REMEMBER THAT IN A MONTH IT WILL BE LIKE EVERY OTHER PLACE YOU’VE EVER BEEN. NOT TO TAKE AWAY FROM THE MAGIC, BUT TO MAKE YOU LESS NERVOUS. YOU BELONG THERE. YOU ARE GOING TO BE AWESOME.

THANK YOU. TODAY WAS OVERWHELMING, BUT IN A GOOD WAY. ALSO, I WORK A SPLIT SHIFT TOMORROW AND GET TO GO TO THE BEACH IN BETWEEN….HOW COOL IS THAT?!

That is cool, Sean. And that is what I miss about teaching. Sean still thinks working fourteen hours with a four-hour break in between is “cool.”

Teaching allowed me to remember the purity of this business, my passion for meteorology. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to teach again soon. There are a ton of young men who could use my makeup tutorial.