At school I had my whole life mapped out: forensic investigation, criminal psychology, the lot. I'd watched enough crime documentaries to be dangerously confident about it, and I've always been fascinated by why people think and do the things they do.

Somewhere in the middle of my studies it dawned on me that the job meant spending every working day in the darkest corners of other people's lives, and while I probably could have handled it, I didn't want to build my whole life around it. I wanted to actually enjoy Monday mornings, or at the very least not dread them.

So I did what slightly lost people do and tried a few other lives on for size, including personal training and sport psychology, which in hindsight were more of a personal growth phase than a career plan. The answer, annoyingly, had been sitting in front of me the whole time: computers were my favourite subject at school, I was the one everybody phoned the moment anything with a plug stopped working, and I did word searches and spot-the-difference puzzles for fun. (I still do, and I'm not sorry.)

These days both halves of my brain get to work on the same problem. A BSc in Computing and a certificate in Digital Marketing and Graphic Design mean the logical side gets its puzzles and the creative side gets its colours, and growing up in a business-minded household taught me early to ask what any of it actually does for the bottom line.